skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This brings out the whole "what is an idea worth" question again. And my stand is that it is worth next to nothing.

Take Skype, which is one of the companies mentioned in the article. No, they were not the first company ever to do voip. This, of course, begs the question: Why didn't the first movers become huge successes? After all they had a lead of around ten years.

Because of execution.

The reason skype became a success was not that they had an idea that was so awesome the money just started pouring in - it was years of hard work, good design and smartness that got them there. I know that they first tried to raise capital in Denmark, but nobody understood what the heck they were talking about, so they had to move abroad and try there. They were basically so set on the idea that they, after having been put down by almost all VC's in their own country they moved abroad to get funding. Their determination is what made them successful, it had very little to do with the idea.

They might just as well have started a filesharing network and had success with that. Oh wait... They did...
So was it their great idea that Paul was sold on, or was there something else that made them stand out?
Ideas are nothing. Execution is everything.
There is a huge fallacy to this.

You would think that any formal system could be defined with axioms, but there are undefinable formal systems.

In GEB, Hof explains that he thinks that this could be the missing piece to creating AI/life.
If the blood-letting is still working for you, then, by all means, stick with it.
There's a significant difference there. Beer costs money to replicate, programs do not. The marginal cost of adding a new user to the Free-Beer program is the price of a case of beer. The marginal cost of adding a new user to your startup's community is a minor bandwidth charge. I'm not completely sure but I'm willing to bet that if you make a good enough service, people will come. With such a small marginal cost per user, you can afford to grow a userbase before you start incurring serious charge, and once you've reached a point where bandwidth costs are actually meaningful, you can almost definitely find a way to make money off of it.

As another user said, the companies listed so far failed for auxiliary reasons. One of them to be wary of is overexpanding, which is basically what Webvan did. The trick is to not do a massive land-grab unless you absolutely have to; Read this- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
The big-label music industry is truly unbelievable. Just when you think their bad ideas can't be topped, they come up with this.

They need to take a cue from what the Nine Inch Nails did (and the success they witnessed) with the release Ghosts I-IV: http://tinyurl.com/2u9wzk
Ever wonder what fonts Web 2.0 companies use in their logo?
The problem I've found is sometimes they are spam-trapped (at least in my experience) and so you can lose people who you would want
I downvoted the comment because it contributed nothing to the discussion at hand and was a poor shot at a one-liner, akin to what reddit is filled with these days.
Right, but nobody said that it does. The point is rather that if nobody notices what you're doing, you don't even get to the point of dying because of a bad business model.
Yes and yes

"Within a few weeks of being out in SV we were introduced to the guys behind, YouOS. As fate would have it, one of the founders (Srini) was actually living in the building next to us and we started having informal hacking lessons where he’d teach us how to hack. We got on really well and we agreed to work together more formally for the three months of YC - he’d help us build our product and teach us how to become hackers."

"Shortly afterwards, again through YC, we met Patrick Collison - a young whizzkid hacker (he wrote his own programming language when he was 16) who’d applied to YC with an idea relating to the online auction space."

http://blog.harjtaggar.com/?p=37
As the comments in the original article state, the Airbook was hacked 2 mins into the second day. So it was 24hrs + 2 mins = 1,442 mins.

And the rules are:
1st day: only network vulnerabilities (and a $20,000 prize)
2nd day: WWW attacks opened up (essentially changed from OS network security to browser security.) Safari fell to a javascript vulnerability (i think). The dude won $10,000 for that.
3rd day: Applications get to be installed.
Yeah, I'm not sure ideas are stolen as much as iterated and improved upon. Accusing people of stealing ideas can be a pretty slippery slope... itList may have some of the same elements of digg, but didn't put it all together in the same way. I suppose this makes them similar ideas, but entirely different products.
Look at it from a business perspective:

What do you gain from having an e-mail:

- usually nothing, unless you send your users spam.

What do you lose from having an e-mail:

- around 10% of your potential customers. (the number probably varies wildly from site to site)

- People who lose their password can't get into their account, unless they choose to provide an optional e-mail adress.

To me that is a pretty clear choice.
The whole article is kind of warped by it's insistence on the word "stolen." Digg owed a lot to websites that came before it, but there was no stealing. As a matter of fact, Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us provided a lot of useful advice early on.
The scary thing is that most people who will use Loopt will never know that a small team of co-founder/hackers around their age created it. They'll just use it.
In my opinion the more hurdles you present the more users you drive away.

There are legitimate reasons for introducing hurdles like requiring registration, requiring activation e-mails, etc. Ask yourself whether the benefits of activating outweigh the potential downsides. If you're requiring activation e-mails to prevent bots from signing up, how significant of an impact will those bots have on other users? On a forum it may be pretty significant, as the site can be flooded with unwanted posts. There are other cases where a bot signing up would really have no substantive impact on a user, because they wouldn't be inconvenienced by the bot.

That's a rather roundabout answer, but it effectively boils down to this: you should remove every unnecessary barrier between your user and your site. I consider an unnecessary barrier something that doesn't improve the quality of the site and/or the user experience.
People use Mailinator anyway so it is just one more airport TSA type annoyance that accomplishes nothing.
Rogue Wave is not a startup
Unfortunately it's a slide into irrelevance. The execs and braintrust at Microsoft generally don't "get" the Internet.

PG, not BG's "The Road" is absolutely coming to fruition.
Well done, great read.
I'm willing to go all-in and bet that YC's network of connections enabled Loopt to become a player
If you don't have any secondary costs this is true.

A lot of web companies still need to "pay the rent" or other variable costs. Even without that, don't forget that revenue gives you a huge leg up when searching for funding.
I am going to stop using them.
I've heard much the same, although I think this will start to change for the better after the iPhone App Store goes live.

My prediction (and hope) is it ushers an era where consumers expect to have the ability to install any application they want on their mobile device, without having to go through their carrier to do so. I think carriers will start to lose that power and Apple will drive the change.

The best solution is still to stay off deck in the sense of offering a WAP-based web application rather than something that is installed. But this obviously wont work for some type of applications (Loopt is one of them). Loopt is doing great though, I am excited about their success.
I used ehealthinsurance.com to find a plan for myself when I got to college. I went with an HMO to keep costs down for myself, and really only bought it for "just in case" scenarios.

On the other hand, most people don't seem to know that the vast majority of doctors are perfectly willing to negotiate rates with people who are uninsured. You're not going to get much of a break on your bill when you have a sore throat and need some antibiotics, but if you need an outpatient surgery, for example, you can expect steep reductions.

I was in that situation and the surgeon cut his rate in half and charged me nothing for any follow up office visits, which went on for some two or three months. The hospital operating room charge was the most expensive part of the whole equation, but they still dropped about 30% off their rates if I paid in full up front, which wasn't a problem with a credit card that I keep paid off.

All in all, it still cost me several grand to have the surgery done, which would have been the cost of several years worth of my current insurance payments. On the upside, I got to shop around for a doctor I was comfortable with and had faith in, as opposed to having a much smaller pool to choose from with an HMO.

Something else you could look in to is a health savings account. Basically, it's a tax free savings account that can only be used to pay for medical expenses unless you want to be taxed on what you withdraw from it, kind of like an IRA. The idea is that you should put the same amount in that account as you would pay an insurance company, but it's still your money. If you don't end up having to spend it, it's still in your pocket as opposed to an insurance company's coffers. If you're diligent about making deposits to it, that's probably the best way to go if you don't have some sort of corporate or government health care to draw from.
The WAP deck will only be important as long as the current handset install-base is present. The iPhone changed the industry from day one, but the realities of mobile web are still present, at least for the next year.

Loopt is in a position to be on the cusp, with a leg-up over all the new comers BECAUSE they wrangled the WAP deck before the turnover.
twitter is a good counterexample.
I've moved to using soft email confirmation, meaning that it doesn't prevent the user from doing anything, it just removes a message on their dashboard or whatever reminding them to confirm their email address.

Context is everything, but 99% of the time soft confirmation or no confirmation at all is fine.
Actually, I've often felt that "first comer advantage" is more of a DISadvantage, in all aspects of tech, not just Web2.0. I think that overall there are more historic examples of the first-comers not being the dominant market leaders. This goes all the way back to the dawn of the PC (CP/m vs, MS-DOS, VisiCalc vs. Lotus 123 vs Excel, WordPerfect vs. MS-WORD, etc.).

It is difficult and expensive to create a new product, and thus a new market. It takes a lot of time effort and energy to figure out what people want and how to deliver it. Almost every new technology startup has a 20 man-years worth of features and ideas that they just don't have time to implement. Similarly, they often have 20 man-years worth of work wasted on features that didn't get used or pan out the way expected.

Contrast this to a "second-comer" company who only has to look at what is currently working for the "first-comer" and look at what is missing that customers want (things on that 20 man-year long list of RFE's). This second-comer has a much more pinpointed goal, they know better what they want to develop and how it should look in the end. They also do not have to wait for a customer base to develop, or expend marketing dollars to create demand. Additionally they can piggy-back on the marketing dollars that the first-comer invested (Check out bar.org, it's like foo.com but without all the annoying baz).
the moral of the story is "Thou shall not be an innovator. Thou shall copy and have a bigger Mouth"
Are you working on the Netflix Challenge? If not, why is it actually important that you know about it?

After I started asking myself questions like that, the amount of news I "needed" on a daily basis significantly decreased.
I'm flying over from the UK, might be staying at the Green Tortoise in SF.

Anyone more knowledgeable think that's a bit far away from startup school?
The concept of wiki wasn't stolen, but given.
I doubt it. YC shows the way, you've got to walk the walk. You are seriously underestimating Sam.
the way we're handling this:

1) require no registration

2) allow registration for convenience or features that obviously require it.

3) send out an activation email, but don't bug or even inform the user on the website about it.

4) don't enforce activation.

since for many users activation is an automatism already, you'll still be able to verify a lot of email addresses, but without having to wait/check-spam for the email.
Confirmation emails might be useless, but notifications of new features are not spam.
YouTube solved a difficult problem. How to let people share videos easily. I can't imagine that converting multiple video formats to Flash Video was an easy problem to solve, either.

Plus, their name is subversively brilliant.
I generally get annoyed at sites that keep emailing me about new features. I always unsubscribe or opt-out at sign in, but some people don't offer that feature.
Indeed. Health care, over a long enough time line, becomes the area in most urgent need of innovation.
Integrate clickpass :-)
Yes you're right - this was just off the top of my head...

There might of course also be other valid reasons for wanting an e-mail adresse.
"That's more common than not, if you look at recent web startups."

It is likely common in failed web startups, also.
Yup. If they don't let up, I mark those emails as "spam" in my Gmail. I guess that counts against them.

They should have a "Don't mail me bro" checkbox. I don't always agree with their definition of "spam".
The download client is pleasantly lightweight and unobtrusive.

It's a far cry from the standard Windows crapware that sits uselessly in your tray, wants to be always running, and bothers you to ask about downloading inconsequential 0.0.1 incremental updates every week.
I'm assuming since Kresge only holds about 600 people, that's about how many attendees were accepted (give or take a little bit for cancelations).
I like it. Textbook example of readable code.
activation emails are trivial nowadays. too many bots beat the system. it used to add a level of security, but it doesn't anymore.

and you may be able to say the same for CAPICHAs later once someone devises a way to break them consistently.
A very successful "free intraprise" system that creates very free small groups is underway in the Forest Service. The focus is not on external products and services, but on doing the work that is needed by the line officers. Biological surveys, Oracle database management, trail building, planning, etc. "Enterprise teams compete for these jobs. Line officers with budgets can hire outside contractors, one of several competing enterprise teams in that business, full time employees, etc. The enterprise teams have most of the freedoms of a start-up. They have internal "bank accounts" that they can carry earnings over from year to year. This provides security which allows risk taking. They chose their own products and services and set their own prices. They choose who to hire and have limited ability to fire (from the team, not the Forest Service) team members who do not work out. This is an area of weakness, but not enough to crater the system.

The result is very good. The intrapreneurs (people who behave like entrepreneurs inside a larger organization) are 1.8 times as productive as the average government employee and far happier. They tend to keep working after becoming eligible for retirement. Most say they would never go back to the old bureaucratic way.

There don't seem to be any fist fights. One team got too big and is breaking up into smaller enterprises.

The system was designed based on the book "The End of Bureaucracy and he Rise of the Intelligent Organization" by Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot. Note: I am Gifford) It has also been applied successfully in a large semiconductor firm.

The largest organizations (nations or the entire planet) bring about order using self organizing systems. They do so because, for all the reasons in the article, the chain of command has limited ability to use the intelligence of all the members of a large system. While decision making is concentrated, intelligence is widely distributed, approximately one brain per human.

Very large commercial organizations are possible, but they must use self organizing systems, which involve freedom of the parts, as a major element of organizational design. After all, nations gave up on hierarchy as the method of organizing their economies with the fall of the Soviet Union. Even though it is large, the United States allows entrepreneurs considerable freedom. Large companies can too.

Re: Size of enterprises see: The Dunbar Number at Life with Alacrity:

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html
I work for a Large Auto Rental Company. We need some unbridled programmers. We have a HUGE IT dept, but I don't know what they do. "Managers" sit for hours transcribing data from one program in the computer into another. Hours, days, careers, lives wasted doing what a patch of VBA should be burping onto screens whenever desired. The veterans have never seen what a computer can do, THEY do it. They even use floppies twenty times a day. Please send me a cowboy programmer.
their determination was due to the fact that they believed in their idea. so it's impossible to had very little to do with the idea
50 Ways to get Free Advertising for Your Startup
I don't know Sam personally. I wasn't intending to downgrade Sam here.

Never meant to imply that getting into YC was like a silver-spoon, charmed-type experience for business success. When I said "Loopt", I meant Sam and his co-founders.
I think we could see Loopt in MSM (Time magazine).
I think there are many aspects of the model that can't be scaled via technology. I'm pretty certain that face to face time is really important, and I'm absolutely certain that the casual friendliness of the dinners is vital. Somewhere between the size of a dinner and the size of a Demo Day or party crowd the interactions break down into mingling rather than having actual conversations. I don't know where that size is, but there is definitely a cutoff. The dinner I attended in WFP08 seemed a wee bit too crowded. The noise level was a bit uncomfortable...only towards the end of the evening did I find I was able to carry on a normal conversation at normal levels. I think that makes a very real difference.

Of course, given that I consider the other founders and that intimate dinner experience every week the most valuable part of the program (with pg and Co. being merely the enabler of those gatherings)...one could theoretically split it into two weekly dinner groups (or three, or four, as YC patience and stamina allows), but then you run into the problem of getting good speakers in such abundance. pg would then be running a restaurant rather than a startup starter, though. If a few more good success stories come out of YC, the speaker pool could be bolstered by former YC founder appearances. I enjoyed Sam's talk as much as most (Joe Kraus is still my favorite of the lot).
Toying around with it - certainly not expecting to win any money. Sure, "need" can be defined in all sorts of ways, not only with respect to news. Perhaps it would be most efficient to live like a reclusive monk?
Registration is not extremely minimal, I just went through it. It took about 5 steps, two of which were email confirmation.

Once I did complete registration, I was not logged in - why not? Instead you showed me a "2. Player Information" screen where I had to read about clicking a "home page" link (not underlined, similar color to the rest of the text, tiny font), and then log in again.

Take a look at the Tumblr signup page.

I'm motivated because I've read the book, but most people wouldn't bother jumping through all the hoops.
We've used a hard activation process previously, and only around 40% - 50% of people who signed up actually activated. Think about that ... over half of our users who spent the time getting to know the product enough to sign up didn't even get to use the site properly.

Now that I think about it, I think it's crazy... and I'm not using any activation on my new site. If they got their email wrong during sign-up (an occurence a lot more rare than 50%), they can just change it or sign up again.
I'm curious: what does this buy you over not sending one at all?
Is it just me or is every one else as tired of stories about the RIAA and "big music" as I am? They've now become (and have been) completely irrelevant to me. I don't like/buy/care about their product. The threat of a lawsuit even though I don't download music has faded into the background threat matrix of my life like an unfair IRS audit or eminent domain taking my house.

IF they do succeed in this tax, its just one more tax by a quasi-government agency for stuff I don't use, for people I don't know. There's already 5 others just like it on my Sprint bill as it is now. They're gonna do what they're gonna do and I have little influence in any of it. Unjust? Probably but I have more pressing things to worry about.

I know there are likely some people in this group who care deeply about fighting the injustice behind this, but I for one would rather RIAA nonsense be left to the Diggs and Slashdots of the world and focus on startups and hacking with this group.
And after that they started a hedge fund and have been playing in the real big markets..ever since.

That (hedge funds) and all such things seem to be basically about one thing : Know of a statistical advantage that others don't know and then play mechanically with zero emotions as possible. Play for the long term, play for sensible gains/expectations and put risk-management above everything else.

[Edit] As I am thinking about this : Startups are probably a similar kind of game as well.
I would like to have a black t-shirt with this phrase, and use it on every Anything-camp event out there.
Read further: "But if the computer buyer makes a donation to software development himself, he can take a credit against the tax. He can donate to the project of his own choosing".

I think there would be much less offense taken to this "tax" if we could pay the $5 to the artist of our choosing and get the same benefits.
This is going to be an interesting point in Loopt's history. How this verizon deal comes around and how they embrace the iphone, android, facebook and myspace platforms will determine their success as a company. I think there is a ton of potential here, and the people working at loopt are smart guys, but that doesn't mean this is a slam dunk.

I think it will come down to money. How long can they go on what they have, how much new investment can they gather in the current economic conditions, and how they can monetize these new platforms where the market will bear advertising but not subscription fees.