skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, and just to complete the thought, I would say that non-programmer founders are far from screwed.
I suspect they logged the endpoints, not the contents of the conversations.

4.5 TB / (1 billion coversations/day * 30 days) = 165 bytes/conversation

That's enough for anonymized IDs, IPs, timestamps of start/finish (and probably individual messages in a many-message conversation) -- but not full transcripts or recorded voices.
1) AOL.com to read my mail
2) Google.com
3) youtube.com
High Tech Start Up - John L. Nesheim

Crossing the Chasm - Geoffrey Moore

One Minute Manager (but only if you've never had management experience)
In order to commit to doing a ridiculous amount of work to bring an idea to reality, one must believe deeply that there's a realistic chance the venture will lead to obscene wealth, fame, magazine covers, and a 60 Minutes interview. Believing this, people vastly overestimate the risk that someone else will see how brilliant the idea is and run with it. It goes with the territory.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't constitute proof that they are out to get you.
Who is going to implement this idea?

Hearing this, the novice suddenly achieved enlightenment, several years later.
Instead of selling ideas, I think the person behind the idea is valuable.

Some people have the gift of coming up with great ideas, or shaping existing ideas in a good direction. The evaluation of ideas and solving the details of an idea is something that is an art and has valuable, much more than the idea itself.

People that create ideas that have no vested interest in making it a reality probably don't have a good enough idea.
Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
I'm a month away from starting UI development on my current project. I'm curious whether this group thinks any of the RIA applications are going to be successful. Specifically, we're interested in Silverlight because of the way it extends the Dot Net environment into the browser.
That's pretty trivial to do. Do you have any programming experience?

Here is the method:

1) Use del.icio.us API to extract your bookmarks linking to youtube (http://del.icio.us/help/api/)

2) For each entry in the list, call the downloader script on the url.

3) Optionally convert the video to a better format than FLV (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/converting-youtube-flvs-to-a-be...)

Easy :)
I've heard good things about Lucene, but we use Sphinx:
http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

For our tests, it indexed much faster than the common Lucene implementations, and for our needs was also a tad faster overall. I haven't tried the newest version, though.
Some random benchmarks:
http://jayant7k.blogspot.com/2006/06/benchmarking-results-of...
http://pagetracer.com/2008/02/15/sphinx-and-lucene-search-en...
The difference between genius and insanity is measured only by success.

- Eliot Carver
I hope not. I hope there will be standardized way of doing hardware-accelerated 2D/3D graphics, H.264 video and Ogg vorbis sound on the web.

http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-flash-and-new-techn...
A nice compliment to the books is a "startup dot com" documentary. It has a lot of dot-com era specifics, but it is very enlightening nonetheless.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
NeXT?
I've done some stuff in Flex, and it's nice. I work with people who really like it. Silverlight and JavaFX sound cool in their own way. And AIR makes sense. But they seem just like a convenience to developers and an inconvenience to many users, and don't really make anything new possible. They might be dead ends.
Art of the Start - Guy Kawasaki

How to Get Rich - Felix Dennis

Differentiate or Die - Jack Trout

and of course...

Founders at Work - Jessica Livingston

Hackers and Painters - Paul Graham
for sure, really good movie. theres also a movie on kozmo called edreams. that i havent seen yet :-(.
Bootstrap - Kenneth L. Hess
This guy needs coffee and crullers, STAT! -- Wayne Campbell (Wayne's World)
I'm not saying micro payments wont work, I'm simply saying when Google started there were not NEARLY as many internet users as today, so it's definitely A LOT easier to grow a user base/become profitable online now then it was before.
http://google.com/
http://reddit.com/
http://aldaily.com/
I think it's a mistake to talk about Flex and Silverlight as though they're equals. Flex already has massive market penetration and Silverlight is barely off the ground yet.

Given Microsoft's position it's probably a good long-term bet, but I think it's quite early for use by young startups that need every user they can get.
If you're working in Rails and you just want simple search, Sphinx is the fastest path to getting started.

I think of Lucene as more implementor-neutral than Sphinx; Lucene is an API as well as a Java library.
I've been thinking the same thing for awhile. Initially I had just chalked it up to a browser issue since I'm running webkit nightlies. This seems like a pretty easy thing to remedy though.
Agreed. I was able to set up full text indexing/searching in a few hours.

The longest part of the process was trying to figure out which versions of Java Lucene and Zend PHP Lucene were compatible. FYI:

Lucene 2.1 index format support (which is also used in Lucene 2.2) is included in the current "trunk" branch. It is available via SVN in current nightly snapshots.

We hope to include Lucene 2.1 index format support in ZF 1.5.0. The current release (ZF V1.0.4) works with Lucene 1.9-2.0 index formats.

http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.search.lucene.html#...
We've already upgraded to web 3.0, a.k.a., facebook apps.
Sorry, I don't think I can say much about this without violating the NDA I signed.
The line between an ex-programmer and a programmer is pretty fluid. Just open your resume in a text editor, delete the first three characters in "ex-programmer", and your doom will be averted!

Even better, open a file in your text editor and type

puts "Hello, World"

or, for more style points,

(setq my-triumphant-return "Hello, World")

and, voila, you're a programmer again. At least by the standards of many job applicants.

Of course, by "ex-programmer" you may mean "I used to know how to program, but now the code that our programmers show me is completely opaque and I have no idea what it does or how it works or whether it harbors lots of hidden bugs." In which case... you are probably doomed! ;)
He meant, "I found out that I am better than the Peter Norvig".

No, that's not what I meant. I don't think I'm better than Peter Norvig; nor do I think Peter Norvig is better than me. Our interests are too dissimilar for any fair comparison to be made.

By "... or I interviewed him" I meant in the sense of a journalist or researcher interviewing someone in order to gain information -- in order for me to decide whether I wanted to accept Google's offer, I needed more information about what working at Google Research would mean, and Peter Norvig was the obvious person to provide such information.
Yeah, it's an interesting problem.
I loved it too. Printed it, and it's now on the wall.
I see a lot of comments from those preferring Macs.

As much as I respect that, a lot of people reading this site are bootstrapping startups and I'd never be able to recommend going that route unless you need to use Mac-forte apps (or are developing for it).

If you're strapped for cash, you can get some solid, powerful equipment by looking through sites like NewEgg for "recertified" laptops with stellar ratings.

They won't have the style and the fashion of the Macs, nor do they often come with a 'nix by default, but they're dirt cheap (like ~$520 for a full modern laptop).

Get the job done and avoid the splurging.
Developer convenience/speed is our main motivation for considering Silverlight, but a close second is that we'll be able to create a desktop app with the same code.
That's on a log scale.
Al Gore: ex-VP, environmentalist, gadget freak
Founders at Work (of course)

"Best Practices"-type books that cover the tools and technology the startup is using, whether its Textmate, Unix, Subversion, whatever. Becoming more efficient is never a bad thing.

I'd also add books on management and dealing with people:

- The Art of Speedreading People - Tieger

- Behind Closed Doors - Rothman, Derby

- The Mythical Man Month - Brooks

- Most if not all the books on Joel Spolsky's "MBA Curriculum":

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FogCreekMBACurriculum...
No language is perfect
CNet NOT Buying Revision3
Smarter Ventures - Katharine Cambell
When you really need to get something done overnight, which is common in startups, you'll have to pay extra fees. And no contractor gets to the small details, or gets the whole picture.. Would you open a garage without being an engineer/mechanic? I doubt.
WOW, Joel Spolsky's list is great. A lot of books on there that I didn't mention above that I've read. Funniest book title:

Difference between God and Larry Ellison... is that God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison
"Taking the time to author original, thought provoking and/or informative posts ..."

But maybe you should do this sort of thing just because is good for you in the first place (as opposed to good for your blog/PR). Write down and develop your thoughts on paper, just as you do with code/pseudocode. Then once you have something worthy, publish/share it.
"It's not important to get it right, it's important to get it going"
There is nothing particularly fraudulent about the way the described hedge fund makes money. Selling implicit insurance against the unlikely event is how majority of investment industry operates.

There are two types of investment strategies generally - the ones that bet on equilibrium continuing holding (or reverting to its mean) and the ones that bet that an extreme change will take place.

If you take any credit risk at all (like buying a bond) -- you are in effect selling your creditor an option to default for which you'll be paid a small premium over the life of that bond. Same if you are betting that price of some mildly 'undervalued' security will come back to its historical valuation average.

The example of betting on a change is Soros betting that the Pound will be dramatically devalued.

The first two examples are called 'investment', the later a 'speculation'. Of course, we know why. "Investment theory" holds that extreme events are very unlikely. So betting on average is the only sensible thing to do.

Which is rubbish, of course, because markets are not random and are not described by a normal distribution no-matter what "efficient markets hypothesis" tells you. Markets are dynamical systems and extreme events happen quit often

So, a hedge fund manager who implicitly sells insurance (options) through his strategy is a rule in the industry, not an exception. Articles like this only get attention during times of financial crisis. During the peaceful 'mean-reverting' times (like 5 past years) unscrupulous managers absolutely crowd out the risk-conscious ones. And the investment pseudo-science actively encourages that through use of useless statistical tools like Markowitz portfolio optimisation etc.
"When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it." -- Paulo Coelho
I don't know what kind of testing you've done but nothing even approaches the speed of Lucene. It's by far the fastest open source search engine currently available. If you're using Rails, I cannot recommend Solr enough. It's amazing.

Cutting's a genius.
Grazing the endless web data
Founders that take the core dev team out for weekly meals
I have a feeling that all of these reasons are the effect, and all of the reasons in the article are the cause. That is, hacker software is developed for linux first because it's those idealistic 18-year-olds developing it. More generally, your other points point to perfectionism and passion, two things the people who do things "for fun" generally have in greater supply.
Ever see that scene in Bourne Ultimatum when someone says a non-typical-english word. Blackbriar..

If it's non-SSL, then it's plain text. C'mon - you college folks must have tried to sniff the Ethernet LAN (my college used switching as a deterrent)
genius is craziness controlled
My Yoda TomTom voice says this when the TomTom turns on.
I think Snaptalent is an excellent implementation to target a message ("technical job window shopping")

Now, what if Snaptalent paid a bonus to the original referring blog (if one of the blog's readers was hired - using maybe cryptographically signed tracking codes)? Yes, it's kind of a crapshoot - more a lottery (but the store that sells the winning lottery ticket typically gets a sizeable bonus)
Are you sure? Could it be that AT&T thinks that AT&T->Apple, and only AT&T->Apple, can and should decide what software will run on "their" phones?

If you compare the attitudes of cellphone manufacturers with cellular network carriers over the last decade, the manufacturers have almost always wanted open solutions, while the carriers have almost always tried to keep things closed. Apple is, in this case, acting much more like a carrier than a manufacturer, and I think that this might say less about them, and more about their relationship with Cingular/AT&T.
Henry Ford: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse."
"the future is in beta"

Wired used to have great passages on the inside of the front cover. this one always stuck with me.
News.YC
http://www.techmeme.com
http://news.google.com
Similar to Google Maps jumpstarting AJAX, I believe RIA will take off if/when a big player like Amazon or Google adopts it.

Adobe is trying to get Flash into the Fortune 500/Enterprise with Flex but I think Ruby on Rails has a better chance (and they are different types of technologies)
Ask YC: Are you working on your startup/side-project strictly in your spare time?
If so, what keeps you from working on the startup full-time? Obviously there are many reasons people don't make the leap.

1. Personal reasons / family obligations

2. Can't afford to lose the salary (could tie into 1)

3. You enjoy your day job.

4. You don't think you're capable or have enough experience.

5. You're waiting for that "killer idea".

6. You have the idea you want to go with but you're waiting for some semblance of success ("We have x # of users now, I think we're on to something...")

7. You haven't found the right people to work with.

(EDIT) 8. You're not doing it for the money. You want to build something cool for yourself, your friends, etc.

I'm sure there are many more reasons. What is yours?
If you mean personal blog that is a password-protected, private blog, yes, it's worth it. I track my progress in all kinds of areas, diary-style in a blog. It's easier than trying to hand-write a diary and you can mine stories from the jotted-down experiences.
I think Facebook apps are Web 2.5.

Web 3.0 might be the meshing of the interactiveness of Web 2.0 with premium content that goes beyond YouTube. Think Joost, only evolved beyond crap video.

Web 3.0 might be content designed and built for the web, as TV transitions into an internet appliance (through stuff like Apple TV) rather than a one-way entertainment destination.

And until we start to see this stuff in full swing, Web 2.0 can't be officially declared dead.
I have an idea for a Flash-content search engine. It would require SWF reverse-engineering (something like aspects for Flash) and advanced Flash screen scraping. And I'm not sure it's technically feasible.
Plucene - Perl port of Lucene

http://search.cpan.org/~tmtm/Plucene-1.21/lib/Plucene.pm
Even with all the perceived shortcomings of the iPhone SDK, there is a cracked-open-window of opportunity for a few, best-of-class new applications from new developers.
"could the age of celebrity finally be over?"

Thats like saying that the piano would kill all virtuosos, because all the notes are already there, as opposed to a violin where the player has to press the string on the right spot.

Just getting the pitch right is not gonna make the music, not by a long shot.
A few of us here have a vested interest in RIA's being successful, but I think that success is measured more by user adoption of our work on the platforms rather than the work of Adobe and Microsoft building the platforms.

I love developing in Flex/AIR, and I'm working on a large project now where it makes perfect sense to use it. Obviously my hope is that it is very successful.

My experience with Splashup is that a lot of people think it's AJAX, or don't have any idea what it's developed in, which is perfectly fine with me.
I think Silverlight would have been a great idea 4 or 5 years ago. I would have been a true killer app for asp.net/c#. However, the Achilles heel of all these applications is that they are not google friendly. Meaning they can't be indexed for search. This is fine if you use Silverlight/Flash/Flex/"Acronym of choice here" for a portion of your site (calculator, graphing, media player).

However, the learning curve for these technologies is always steep. Now not only do I have to know php/asp.net/etc but I also have to know some kind of rich client application.

I see the sweet spot as media player for your site. Take http://www.pandora.com/ for example. This is a good way to use these rich client frameworks.

That being said, when I can't copy and paste text from these application, it really limits their usefulness. HTML/CSS/JavaScript is a pretty good stack. There will have to be something that really compels me to use them before I'll divert the resources of my shop to learn/adopt/deploy them.
Longviewer: Timeline Visualization Spanning Centuries & Millennia
I make a pretty good salary at my current job. I have a young son at home and I provide all the benefits. My salary could be replace, my benefits would be much harder to replace.

So nights, weekends, lunchbreaks, etc, I'm writing and hacking away...
My blog has been a godsend. For me, as a hacker writing about hacking, it has opened doors, made introductions, answered questions, and sharpened my thought.

Biggest drawback is that the really bad ideas get archived on the intertron forever, along with the rare nuggets of gold.
I've always wondered where the 'internets' was born :)
A startup story
Are you fking kidding me? Web 2.0 just mean the web is starting to work right.

Seriously, Web 1.0 isn't over. Step out of the reality distortion field. Nowbody outside of digg/reddit/news.y/oreilly knows what the heck the web really is let alone web 2.0. Just make good stuff. That never goes out of style...
Who is Secretly Pitching You
No, they won't, they'll continue to fail miserably in comparison to HTML and JavaScript because they miss the single biggest thing that makes HTML and JavaScript so dominant, no view source.

HTML and JavaScript dominate because of their openness and easy of transfer of knowledge. If you see anything cool that you want to know how to do, you just check out the source, that openness is why the web works.

That openness is also why search engines can crawl in and index things, something RIA's don't allow. RIA's have their place, but they'll never succeed big on the open net precisely because they themselves aren't open.

There's only one standard open method of building RIA's, Ajax! No closed proprietary technology can compete against that. They may be technically superior, but they aren't socially superior, and that's what matters most.
"... Can a startup entrepreneur not be a coder? ..."

Yes. Mitch Kapor was underestimated and you can use this to your advantage. He was seen as a novice non-tech in his Startup, recognised this & profited from it. Read about Mitch Kapor ~ http://www.kapor.com/bio/ and I've written more about this here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/2296168310/
I forget to mention I work in a .net environment and I've also built a startup (http://whatsyour20.com) using asp.net.

Unless you really need the features slow down and evaluate your need for silverlight. Do you need it or do you want to use the new shiny stuff?

I don't even use the asp.net ajax framework, instead preferring jquery for my ajaxxy stuff. Asp.net can be a great tool but I can't really comment on silverlight as I've yet to find a real need for it.
Ok, What I was getting at here is that ordinary people will see in a very real way just how easily stars like Britney can be manufactured. Photoshop has already come a long way in exposing to everyone in a visceral and easy to understand way the simplicity with which images can be altered. Everyone kind of knew this before hand but its now becoming ingrained.

I wasn't suggesting that everyone will suddenly be a virtuoso, I'm just hoping that as people in the future are presented with manufactured stars the response will change to "big deal, I know a guy who can do that on his mac with a girl down the street. They're really good. Here, listen...".

Of course, this won't fix the publics fascination with giving people who can't handle it celebrity status and too much money and using the inevitable train wreck as entertainment. At least we'll quit pretending its music.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16031
I recommend "The Design of Everyday Things" (formely "The Psychology of Everyday Things") by Donald Norman. It's kind of dated and it's focused on product design, but it has some very good ideas about making products that are easy to use and understand.
Well, I'm not fond of the term Web 2.0 as you can see from an article I wrote.
http://duffsdevice.blogspot.com/2008/01/from-web-20-to-web-3...

Web 2.0 is over when this bubble pops. Web 3.0 starts with the next bubble.
I am writing my own ... Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs

http://www.startupforless.org
To answer my own question, I think I'm a combination of 2, 6, and 8.

I make a decent salary working on a project for the DoD. It's a project that's fairly interesting and to top it off we get to use Rails, which I enjoy using and learning. If I didn't feel like I was getting anything out of the job then I'd probably look to something else.

I don't really feel a sense of urgency to strike it rich yet. I just want to build something cool. For now I'm happy just working at my own pace and trying to maintain a decent work-life balance. I'm in grad school part time and once that's over I'll have more time for my personal projects.
1) Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell (very interesting ideas)

2) Innovator's Dilemma (for understanding what can work well)

3) Inside Intuit (for a great business story)

4) Eric Sink on the Business of Software
not counting google/gmail?

1. netvibes
2. news.yc
3. twitter
Your argument is a tautology. "America is better for it," is true, because America is always being redefined as it changes. "The groups who comprised America a 100 years ago" are perhaps not better for it. It is a trivial thing to point out that AmerIndians are quite a bit better off in every measurable aspect of their lives than 500 years ago. Every has improved but the real estate/sovereignty situation.
Nope. What will be successful is RMA: Rich Mobile Applications.
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt
Yeah, benefits can be a big deal. I work for a small defense contractor and they're paying for me to go to grad school.

There's certainly nothing wrong with taking the safer route when you have a family to provide for.
For the German readership: "Cash Code" by Tritsch and Kohlhammer. It has a focus on the legal and administrative stuff around a startup. http://www.cashcodeportal.de/