skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're absolutely right - this is a good reason for having a users e-mail. There are probably many others as well.

You just shouldn't request an obligatory email adress, or even worse a confirmation by email, unless you really have to. It tends to scare a lot of users away.
Well, I found that I was spending hours a day on reddit, slashdot, and N.YC before I realized that most of the "news" I was getting had no direct or indirect impact on my life. Now, I mostly just read the headlines on the other sites. This is the only one that I often read articles on, much less comment about.

It was a huge time sink for me to be concerned about things that don't matter. :)
'Naughty Auties' battle autism with virtual interaction
Getting A VC's Attention
That's an interesting argument but I suspect that advertisers care only about the number and quality of referrals. The specifics of the process Google uses to generate those referrals are abstracted away from the advertiser so they probably don't care how many users pass over their ad so long as they get n quality leads.

But my comment may have been a little confusing without explanation. The total number of aggregate clicks is dependent on (a) the number of impressions and (b) the ability to convert those impressions into clicks.

The number of aggregate clicks will increase so long as a, b, or a and b together, continue to increase. If either a or b are increasing, there will be growth. If both a and b are increasing, there will be accelerating growth. In this sense, we're just seeing the end of accelerating growth, not the end of growth all together.

What's more, (b) will increase discretely as Google modifies its ad-selection algorithm, so it should look more like a step-wise function than anything else. It doesn't seem like a cause for alarm when the graph of (b) plateaus for a bit!
Thanks for the link. I can totally empathise with the difficulty of finding hackers - even 9 to 5 ones. And it doesn't instill hope of finding hackers out side of London when they couldn't find any in London.
No, romance is dumb.
If it's common in successes and failures then it doesn't have predictive value and isn't worth stressing over.
Had a girlfriend when I started my company. I haven't had any time for socializing since she left. Anyone else in this boat?
So if I start at 9am from home I don't have to do any coding?

Sign me up for that job.
Thankfully, Johnny Knoxville will ride to their rescue as Crispin unveils their new consumer facing campaign!
That's why you can't copyright ideas.
The one with lower points might have a much higher ratio of points/time.
you don't consider posting on YC to be a form of socializing?
My advice: go to an insurance agent, they aren't just there to get paid, they (usually) know exactly what they're talking about. Also check out the Freelancers union, because they have group-health(ish) policies to check out.
Startup school podcast/video
are podcasts/videos from earlier startup schools available? if yes, where can i find them?
An agent I know pointed me to http://www.onlineinsurancecorp.com where I got the following:

$1000 Deductible
20%(me)/80%(them) split from $1000-$3000
100% coverage over $3000
$30 office visit copay

For $55.28/mo. Of course, I'm 24 and got the 'healthy lifestyle bonus' ... whatever that means.
If you don't even have time as a student, how will it be once you join the workforce?
My FF crashed on pageload. Will think twice before clicking links here.
ROTFL is not the right reaction if you follow it up with, basically, "Your hypothetical futuristic scenario is not like my real-life right-now scenario!" I said "If" for a reason.

I don't think immortality is or should be an unquestioned right, but I suspect that within a decade or two of it being a realistic possibility, letting people die will be about as popular as slavery.
Thanks for the tip and the links. I appreciate them.
Yes and its very distracting. Girlfriends are money/time/attention pits (but I mean that in a good way).
I'd have to imagine Kernen was joking.
Some of the articles' suggestions were good ones. And yes, you should always have some ideas for how to monetize your business. However, one key problem is that if you try to implement a monetization strategy before you build a user base and really understand who shows up at your site, your monetization could be completely wrong.

Consider the following possibilities: your user base turns out to be very broad-based and large, your user base turns out to be smaller, but a significant percentage of them is from a particular demographic or vertical, or your product turns out to be most interesting to other businesses or other websites that want to integrate what you built into their own businesses. Each of these scenarios implies a different approach to monetization.

Given the way your understanding of a market can change as you actually meet the real people who use your site, a change in targeted user base can happen to a lot of different businesses. And if you spend too much time up front working on revenue, you may end up throwing all that work away when you confront the actual opportunities that present themselves.

For some businesses, you may have a precise understanding of who your customers are going to be in advance, and then that turns out to be exactly who they are. If that works out for you, cool. But my guess is that that's not the most common scenario, especially for a website.
My friends who are managers say it is one of the most difficult things to do as a manager - tell someone they are being let go. "You're not a manager until you have to do that"

Some managers disassociate with the actual task - by acting very remote
I thought about the problem of the entropy too. This is the thing that worries me most about the future at all. One thing that I hope for, but I am not sure, is that the number of atoms in the universe is somehow a constant (might be true for smaller, more essential particles) and if those atoms could once be created (I am a creationist, but it holds true for evolution as well), they COULD be recreated, replenishing the supplies. In fact, we could become very very good at recycling and turn all our trash into a source, instead of waste. Maybe with nanotech? I believe it would be very easy for a bunch of nanorobots to grab atoms of gold in an old discarded motherboard and pile them up, creating a fresh gold bar from them. Is it too far fetched?
If your cost per user is less than the incremental revenue each user brings you, it doesn't matter how little those users cost: You're still following the "we'll make it up on volume" battle cry in the wrong direction.

Bandwidth and server costs are still costs. Whether you split those costs among four customers or four million, you still need to recoup them and show a profit to create a sustainable business.
I have a girlfriend, but the condition I made when starting the relationship is that she has to be ok with me being too busy certain weeks to see her. I promise to see her once a week at the least, and she's ok with that. She's not thrilled about it but feels that some of me is better than none, so she accepts it.
poll?
Study on Personalities of Mac vs. PC Users [Video]
In 2000? Maybe not. It was very different back then.

In any case, even if you don't think Broadcast.com or some of his other business ideas are the smartest ever, you can't fault the guy for being smart enough to take the money and run.
dating, worse than having a gf i think, the mindgames are still in effect! grrrr
There is a lot to like about Obama -- but this is just plain wrong.
I do. It helps that we're both extremely busy, so our "dates" often wind up being the nights when we both have portable work and can hang out together while we grind away.
Ask YC: a/s/l?

Seriously... this is getting stupid.
In fact, this should be a real irritant to academics who would not blink twice at rejecting anyone over resume inflation.

So why have they not rejected Obama?
Best Product Manager Ever?

Or would that award go to Marissa Mayer?
Implications Of How A VC Is Funded: Government
Opera and Safari beat IE and Firefox to Acid3 milestone
The "WAP Deck" represent the idea that people should find their mobile services or "content" from a startpage when the go online on their phone. this make no sense for anyone who know how the internet grew. Google overtook Yahoo when they still believed that the internet should be organized like a directory, like there were a limited "shelf" space. That wasn't true and it wont be true for mobile either.

Admob, one of the largest mobile ad network has a monthly reach of 50 million unique users, that's about the size of one of the largest carriers in the world.

I'm certain that the concept of "Carrier WAP Deck" will not grow in the same pace as the open mobile web....

Congrats to Loopt! :)
If activation mails were to get me back to where I was when I was REQUIRED to register, then I would find them less annoying.

Instead, they get me to some new windows, on some profile page. And when I get back to the original window, guess what? I have to "login"!

Dude, I just registered and now you want me to "login"?

Conclusion: Activation emails suck. At least the way they are implemented today.

BTW: When I enter my email address and password in a "login" form, please don't blame me "You are not registered", register me instead!

"login" + "register" = "login" -- There is no need for two actions.
Broke up with mine when I moved out to the valley. It wasn't too serious and the distraction sux. For valentine's day I wrote my computer a poem in python.
Ripple is a social network lending project...
Yes, and it actually improves my productivity. She edges me on to work when I feel like slacking off, and I can have intelligent conversations about whichever ideas I have as long as I can break them down to a non-techie.
I mean no disrespect, but as a computer science major at a well recognized school and an overall geek I had several concurrent gf's during university and went out about 4 nights a week on average.

Looking back, I was a fool, but I am glad I lived that way for a few years. It taught me many lessons.

edit: Re-reading I laugh at how I always throw in that 'good school' part. Perhaps it is because years later I still have stress-dreams about exams there, and the courses were like getting kicked in the balls daily.
Every additional step loses you users, even adding one more field to a form.
The Xbox 360 has been amazingly successful. Not sure what similarities you see between it and Vista.
Can you think of a counterexample? How many purely web-based startups have become massively popular and then died?
Domino’s Launches Recession Meal - 444 Deal
I was using "socializing" in place of "dating".
Bigger lesson here is that first-mover isn't really worth that much if you're going to get it wrong. Act early on trends, but don't be first; let someone else make the mistakes for you.
hasn't there been a 5-5-5 at pizzabutt for like years?
Married to my cofounder
It is a reasonable question due to stereotypes, geek lifestyles, etc.
takes time != free
I'd like to see a real face-book. People's pics and their affiliations. Might get on this shortly.
All excellent points. Thanks for posting this.

I agree that 2 months should never be a cause for alarm for something like this. It's only that for so long they had been able to keep building significant continuous improvements in clickthrough rate that makes it a potential warning sign.

At some point, clickthrough rate could actually end up plateauing on an ongoing basis as they run out of ways to keep improving the rate. Then their ad business would be solely dependent on impression growth (which I assume would still be fine) for clickthrough growth.

Of course, as you point out, referral quality is also an important factor, so even if they get the same number of clicks, that might be great for advertisers if it's better traffic.

Is this the end of growth in clickthrough rate? Unlikely. But it's always good to keep an eye on these things in case it turns out to develop into a trend.
Most interesting statistic I've read today:

"Breaking stride to pick up a penny, if it takes more than 6.15 seconds, pays less than the federal minimum wage."
Harvard, MIT retain top grad-school rankings in magazine survey
Another way to sell the "data" is to use the information you know about your users and sell not only trends, but targeted advertisements based on your user data.

Think about Myspace and Facebook. They have a ton of information about their users (and a statistically relevant amount of info about the general population as well). The magic is that they can sell ads to men between the ages of 18-21 who are in a state college and earn less than $30,000 per year. Not many companies have access to that amount of information about their users.
Cogent & Telia resume peering, bridging Internet rift
I spent about 5 minutes on the site and couldn't figure out what it was for. I even registered, and still couldn't figure it out. I then watched the videos and still couldn't figure it out.

I may be dumb, but I may be your average user, as well. I would put up a tutorial or something.
theglobe.com claimed 2M users in 1998

It is now a dot-com boom endnote
"Are you ready for some hard core rejection?"

lol. That and some hard core misinformation apparently (at least according to a few of the VCs we've talked to).

We'll keep at it; where does one shop for good VCs who would look at someone in our situation?
that makes me feel a little sad
I wrote mine in Ruby.

Surprisingly enough, she loved it.
And, since there has been payment, people are then allowed to "pirate" music?
Polls seem to be broken
Were they disabled, or did a bug crop up?
I think too many people have fallen into the trap of thinking "If we build it, they will come (with money)."

This simply isn't the case. You must build something valuable, and capitalize on the value. Unfortunately, traffic isn't quite as valuable anymore.

Think about it, there are a lot more startups now, each with their own eyeballs. The supply of eyeballs has gone way up, which in turn means that with a static demand the value of the traffic has gone down.

Many startups begin with the thinking "We'll build something a lot of people like, and sell advertising from all of this traffic we'll receive." As I've just explained, the value of traffic is much lower with the increased supply. Startups capitalizing on traffic are entering a very competitive market.

Sure, a few companies will gain a massive amount of traffic and do very well (think digg, reddit, etc...), but the majority will need to find another way to be profitable.
I realize every relationship/business is different, but how is that working out - both in the relationship and in the business (if you don't mind sharing)?
I am not sure I know what that title/quote means. Could someone explain?
If you only had 30 seconds of attention, what's the best way to prove to the user that you're worth any more investigation?

Right now due to the current design deficiencies mentioned by AnotherUser, that user is heading elsewhere.
Well, considering that you can enter all the text for a new poll, but when you click the Submit button you seem to end up at blank page, I'm going to vote for "bug". Otherwise, it's a really obtuse way to disable the polls.
Philippe Starck: design is dead
Also good: The Eudaemonic Pie

http://books.google.com/books?id=Q9aOedEfOMMC&dq=eudaemo...
Well, the difference between $200/share and $230 would be about $300 million, since he says he sold for $2B. $300 million isn't small potatoes, even if you have $2B.
Moblogic Demo
Mob4Hire - Hire Mobile Testers From Around The World
I was never sure how you could enter a new poll - it wasn't obvious.
Under 21 => not allowed in bars in the US.
Generally, investors are wary of married couples, in that they've been burned before. So we need to be very cognizant of the way we act around each other to ensure they get the most positive impression. If you read accounts of the flickr cofounders, you'll also get anecdotal evidence (that I've never experienced) that some investors are assholes and don't take women seriously.

We have complementing skillsets, which is perfect on the work side of it.

On the relationship side of it, I have no idea how people do startups that have significant others _not_ involved. Not only do we spend the vast majority of our time on the project, but we talk about it when we aren't working on it. How could an uninvolved party tolerate that?
Advertising my new blog, read it!
Total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006
555 was also Domino's'.
NVIDIA drivers responsibile for 30% of Windows crashes
But they're not necessarily doomed:
http://tipjoys2cents.blogspot.com/2008/03/newspapers-not-nec...
> BTW: When I enter my email address and password in a "login" form, please don't blame me "You are not registered", register me instead!

I had the exact same idea, but maybe registration should require a captcha too, so..
The Rete Matching Algorithm
Python: Dataflow Programming
This advice might sound a bit "old-school". I would recommend you stick with college for at least another year or two. Being a recent graduate myself, I can understand how the stuff you learn in college seems pointless and may not be applicable to what you really want to do/accomplish. However, college really helped me learn how to learn things fast. And that, is a valuable skill to have.
I see your point. This is the classic business mindset.

I would venture to say though that the classic rules can be broken for other considerations because the Internet is a new medium.

I will get to other considerations in a minute but the main thing to understand is that the Internet breaks the old rules by lowering distribution costs.

It makes sense to delay monetization if you have a compelling user proposition that can be scaled quickly through word of mouth(ebay,youtube,flickr) or by partnering with an 18 wheeler (google,paypal,skype).

The assumption here is that if you build a large user base it takes a very small number of paying users to make money.

Its easy to see that in each case there is a real value proposition. In fact none of these applications would exist except on the Internet.

Although some rules have changed, the old rules still apply i.e. building something with a real value proposition and then distributing it without breaking the bank.

Those that failed did not create real value in the marketplace not because of monetization.
We know that romantic relationships frequently hurt people. This leaves some pro-romance positions available such as:

- it only hurts foolish people; there are known solutions to all those problems

- it's worth the risk of being hurt

- there is a type of relationship that is different than conventional romance in a way that prevents being hurt, but is still romantic

So, anyone want to debate, or just stick to downvoting? None of the pro-romance positions are obviously correct.
http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll

Provided you have at least +200 karma.
It was them, not the idea. They seemed extremely driven. I think Chris referred to this in his post.
Yup, broken for me, too.
Could it be because MS' relevance has reduced drastically in a lot of places? Its monopoly is going away, slowly but surely. Office is still a killer, but indications are that we will get other powerful choices - one sunny day. (In fact, most light document editing is easily accomplished by Google Docs.)
Web developers, fix thy Flash
How To Hack Facebook In 51 Seconds
Married, and seem to have some curious small people running around breaking things. They scare me.
But isn't the fuzziness of words and their inability to convey the most general truths a very old idea? The Tao says, "the tao that can be told is not the true tao" and then goes on to describe the limits of words in more detail.
Bug; fixed; sorry.
60+ Resources for Entrepreneurs
A list of resources compiled by an Orange County VC network.
Does this really surprise anyone?

When does security as an afterthought ever work?
A boyfriend? Why settle with one? I have two.
Is there a transcript or summary of this anywhere? I just can't stand to watch or listen to this guy.
Start or become a key contributor to at least one open-source project. For one, this gives you experience and a good base for answering interview questions. Two, this makes you more "Googleable" (I have my current job because my employer found me, through a site that wouldn't have existed if not for my open-source project!).

College is important, not just for tuition. For example, I was able to teach myself HTML and aspects of Unix about 10 years ago while I was a student, primarily because I had a student Unix account with 'net access (still not that common off-campus). This turned out to be at least as important for landing the job "meant for my degree" (computer engineering), even though I'd taken no courses for the extra skills I'd acquired.
Is anyone else surprised it's that low?
True. But if you ever run an online forum, you notice that junk comments are typically posted anonymously. Adding even a small hurdle cuts down the amount of junk by as much as 80-90%.

It is similar to the "crime of opportunity" in real life .. or a "heat of the moment" if you will. Make people pause or engage before posting and most of them change their minds about posting crap.
Friendfeed Frenzy - Why it continues
Everyone is entitled their opinions, I dont see why this had to be downmodded necessarily because it is a valid statement. Besides the fact that antisocial people tend to say things like that. And nobody likes antisocial people. And they dont like anyone either, by definition.

I guess it was downmodded cause he didn't back up his valid statement.

Of course, I disagree with his statement. No gf here but I've got a date to prom ;)
American John Griggs Thompson and France's Jacques Tits win Abel Prize
With the advent of services like mailinator (http://www.mailinator.com), it is getting easier to bypass these precautions, but at least it can be useful in ensuring the registrant is a human?
An ability of directly communicating with your users has a very positive effect on a valuation of the company. One thing is when you have N million User IDs, and another - N millions emails.

Also if you are running a service with termed licensing, an email communication is how you drive the license renewal process. This sort of communication does not qualify as spam, because it is more of a service reminder rather than an unsolicited commercial offering.
European startup news roundup
I find I'm less hostile to MS now (note that I didn't use M$, like I used to), because unlike many I feel that vista was a great security update (My family that uses vista has not complained of adware or viruses since), while I use linux.

However I must note, even as a person hostile to mac, I live in awe of the might of Steve Jobs and his influence on the masses.

"Look, its a thin laptop computer that sony made long ago but I decided to push!"

"Look its a phone, but not just any phone, it is an iPhone! You must buy it!"

"Look its a decently constructed but sorely overpriced piece of common technology that I decided to work on a little and brand with my company name! You must buy it!"

The next 2 years, Apple's stock triples.
This isn't really hacking Facebook... they're hacking the Moods app, which is made by HotOrNot.
Google Launches Library For iPhone Application Development