skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Visual Studio guy was likely me. I actually didn't resize the form even once; maybe you're just using some poetic license there. Since the internet connection was slow, I couldn't get to my server, so I decided to do one of my favorite 'programming kata' projects: writing a function plotter. I had never done it using GDI, and since I work for Xobni I already had Visual Studio on my laptop (no cloud necessary). The form was 'empty' because the only element in it was a panel. Funny enough, the only guy I remember sitting next to me (that I didn't already know) was also using a Windows laptop. Was that you?

The truth of the matter is, my company has used Sheridan's firm before; we've since moved on to another. I've also incorporated companies before. Next time I incorporate a company, I will still be hiring a high dollar lawyer to handle it. I came to startup school for the other 90% of talks, for which my laptop was put away, and my eyes were glued to the front (Altman, DHH, PB, Bezos, Andreesen, Norvig (who was a childhood hero of mine)).

It's pretty arrogant of you to pontificate about what should be important to everyone else. I doubt Sheridan was insulted that I was quietly using a laptop in the back of the room. Anyway, it seems like your eyes must have been quite a few other places than his presentation to keep such good track of what everyone else was doing.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/books/humor/8e6c/images/2070/

P.S.: I agree with you about the reception of DHH's talk, and I felt like one of the only ones to take him very seriously.
prevayler?
Craigslist doesn't have an open system. Craigslist blocks ip's of those accessing there system through a web application and they send out lots of cease and desist notices. It just is not worth the time to develop something that might even benefit Craigslist.

Piggybacking on bigger sites is a good idea, just find one that is interested. Paypal did for eBay and it worked out for them, There is a lot of room to develop things using ebay. For example, maybe a craigslist format but for ebay auctions.
Features aren't the only thing they're getting.

The guys at Xobni are extremely talented and Microsoft always wants talented engineers.
Are we talking about marketing or advertising? There is a big difference.

If we're talking about advertising then I think Apple will always be up near the top of the list - especially on sites like Hacker News.

I think 37signals does a great job of marketing their products, but they spend very little (any?) on advertising. Their well designed products and self promotion lead to a pretty large group of 37signals evangelists, so they don't NEED to spend money on advertising.

I think the best self promoter out there right now is Barack Obama - the system his campaign has setup to get donations, get the word out about "attacks," etc. is unmatched. I think we can learn a lot by dissecting how his campaign went from the underdog to the frontrunner.
Ask YC: Can you point to someone that has made money off an idea?
There has been quite a lot of debate here about what an idea is worth. Some users think that an idea is worth a non-trivial amount of money, and some think that the value is in the execution.

So the question is: Can you point to anyone that has made a substantial amount of money off an idea. It has live up to the following criteria:

1) The person selling the idea must have made a non-trivial amount of money.

2) The sale must not include prototypes, large businessplans, etc. Basically what was sold must be the idea - not the marketing plans, tools, etc. to implement the idea.

3) It must be verifiable. There are a lot of urban myths about "a guy that made millions from selling a simple idea" but I haven't yet found any that stand up to scrutiny.

So can you point to anyone that has successfully sold an idea?
Paying millions of dollars for a few talented engineers, who will probably work half-heartedly for a few months/year, depending on the clauses in the contract, then move on to the next startup? Come on, USD is not that weak.
> "Woahhhhh I've been looking for this exact thing for years. So have my friends I bet. I need to use this now, and tell my friends what I found"

- That sounds more like Facebook!

Are you sure that the "hmm, that might be useful" -reaction is not good enough?
I'm in a startup working on a competitor to craigslist. We have a long way to go but so far I think we have good bones. We are hoping to work toward being more open for people to build on top of us.

http://www.flugpo.com
Nikola Tesla
I went on an interview at their company a while back and they seemed legitimate. They are NY based with like 10 employees as of 4 or 5 months ago.
and if they did replicate it, everyone would call them assholes. maybe they're trying not to paint a bad image of themselves
assuming you have a good product/service, a good logo and catchy easy to remember name is the foundation of the free word of mouth advertising.
This is one of many reasons why I run my own dns server (which looks up the authoritative name servers for each domain directly from the root servers), rather than trusting comcast.
Thanks from me too! It was a great experience; entertaining, inspiring, and educational.

I did hear a few people saying they wished they had learned more. If any of you read this, I'm curious what you would have like to have seen/heard?
When did xobni get started,anyone know?
What idea did Tesla sell?

I'm aware of him working as a scientist for most of his life, but not selling an idea according to the criteria stated above.
In fact, I found this link by hearing Marc Andreessen at startup school, looking at his blog, reading the 'The Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity', looking at the section on structured procrastination, and discovering this article as the first known instance of an article focusing on the effect in print.
Starting a company on an H1-B
Someone asked this question of the guy from Wilson Sonsini yesterday at Startup School. Here's one answer.

http://www.askthevc.com/blog/archives/2008/04/does-having-a-h.php
UK startup scene needs a confidence boost
In the context I was using it, "diet" implies a temporary change in eating habits. I'm aware of the definition of the word and it's technical usage, but I'm also aware of how it's actually used.
Can you explain why you're creating a craigslist competitor? I'm having a hard time understanding why so many people are doing this.

What problem are you solving?
"Craigslist doesn't have an open system. Craigslist blocks ip's of those accessing there system through a web application and they send out lots of cease and desist notices"

Screw it. Right now, a group here should build a newer, better Craigslist. Enough of you guys are in touch with the SV/Bay scene to bring the eyeballs required to kick it off, because as I see it, it's not a technical problem but rather a marketing one: what you need is a brief but intense "attention burst" to launch something like this.

The bleeding-edge users are all here, or only one or two degrees removed, and could make it work. [Don't look at me, I'm stuck on the East Coast.]
Of course it's modern and western, but not less useful. As for classical buddhism, as far as I got into it it's an ok religion, but just as full of myths and dogma as the orthodox christianity I was born in. I much prefer the modern version. Although after a little sorting I suspect I'd be very interested in a lot of old texts by Dogen and such - something that probably isn't true with christianity.
I believe that Tesla sold several of his patents.
Or phrasing it in a more positive way: by rewarding these guys they are encouraging others to do R&D for them.

It's not like a few million more or less mean much to Microsoft anyway.
There's a lot more to replicating something like Xobni in a megacorporation like MSFT than just the programming. In a lot of cases it's easier to get an acquisition signed off on than a new department to make a new product.

And they get more than just code, and people who write code. They get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup. They get people who have vision, which MSFT appears to be in need of these days. It could be the beginning of a new era for them.

Also, Xobni has had a number of high quality engineers (probably much better than what you'd typically find slaving away in the trenches at MSFT) working on their plugin for a lot more than a few months. I'm guessing the programming cost would be a lot higher than you might think.
Hey, I'm the organizer of the Madison Php group. We should get together to talk about your project, I might be able to hook you up with some developers. http://php.meetup.com/125
Why does this stuff get leaked to the press? What happened to confidentiality?
The MyBlogLog Founders Story At Techstars
Their value is not just in being there. What they create will likely exceed the acquisition costs.
I tend to be skeptical about almost any of the pay-to-play things like this. The Angel scene seems to be very much about personal connections and face time. I don't think you can replace that with a $250 a month service. It seems like if you were really bent on dropping money on this sort of thing that you'd be better digging up one of the consultants that pimps your product for you to their investor network.
Not include prototypes? Why place that restriction on it? I read the other day about a woman who invented and prototyped a bra for use with backless dresses. She sold the idea (all rights to the idea) to one of the bigger bra manufacturers and stands to make a lot of money. Does the fact that she put together a prototype from spare bra parts matter? They didn't give her money for the prototype.

What about people who patent ideas and then either sell the patent to an IP holding company or collect money from violators? That, to me, is an example of generating wealth from the idea and not the execution (unless you consider the act of filing for a patent a form of execution). If you allow patent holders, then you can easily find documented examples if you look for them.
"Paypal did for eBay and it worked out for them", which is true but it should also be noted that it worked only after eBay launched a competing product that PayPal was able to beat despite the enormous distribution advantages that an eBay-run competitor had.
That's a pretty serious claim; any pointers? If you've got some I'll be sure to nag Craig about it next time I see him.
Right - openness can be a strong advantage but only after there are some compelling applications built on top of that openness.
Ask YC: MBeA or to not be - is an MBA worth a hacker's time?
I know this is a heavily hacker infested place (it's a good thing :) but, I've been asking this question to many hackers with MBAs and I get different answers all the time. I have come to the conclusion that an MBA curriculum is not as worthy as other technical knowledge, but the networking is worth it, especially if it's a top tier school. Bonus question: which MBA program would is worthy of a hacker's time, i.e. geek friendly :) Any worthy opinions?

(How I jumped to the conclusion: read a gazillion different materials from Andreessen to Bezos to bozos, became a research assistant at a top business school to see what the heck professors really think about the curriculum, and of course, talked to a few dozen MBAs across the world in different fields)
Be Good
Let me add another example. In the film industry, studios sometimes pay large sums of money to buy the option for an unwritten script based solely on a pitch. Granted, the pitch usually has to come from writers that have experience and have written blockbusters, but not always.

The first example I came across during a search: "NEW YORK — Mostow/Lieberman and Village Roadshow have picked up an untitled pitch from tyro scribe and Columbia U. student Simon Kinberg for mid-six figures."

Is mid-six figures substantial for an idea?
Really? Building an OS that works is a solved problem, and they don't seem to be able to do that.

The reason big companies buy startups is because they can't do what they "could" do.
What does being a CS major (or not) have to do with creating a web site? That's a false dichotomy.

More importantly, given that you're a marketing+economics person and want to be an entrepreneur, you should want to learn how to build at least the first few versions of your site yourself. Otherwise you'll never deeply understand how hard/easy it really is, won't have the ability to tweak things for yourself in the future, etc. so as to be able to effectively and quickly adapt to the realities of your market. No offense but that is precisely the job that you're professing to take on as a founder of your first, small startup.
I would guess it gets leaked to the press by people who will eventually want favors in return. Sometimes it might be founders who want to prod other potential acquirers.
Vesting over 4 years...
Yeah, a lot of the torch lamps these days are using CF bulbs since they are more efficient and don't have the big fire dangers. :-(
From the link: "If you cut the numbers a different way and look at Internet-specific deals, those declined 7 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to $1.310 billion, but were slightly up year-over-year"

I wonder, does this fit with people's anecdotal experience? I haven't been trying to raise capital recently so I have no sense over whether the market is slowing down even though it's something I've been worrying about a little. All the more reason to bootstrap yourself though!
If you spend a weekend or two watching machine learning Google tech talks you can start with a roar.

There's also 'Programming Collective Intelligence', Norvig's own book 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach', and the growing Netflix literature.

One of the interesting things people discovered while attacking the netflix problem is that the rating graph encodes features like 'heroism', 'horror', 'absurdity', 'romance', 'political protest', and 'not monty python' -- you only need a little ingenuity to assign words to said features by looking at extreme feature exemplars.
Easier to create problems than in PHP? Naw, just different.
If this goes through, congrats to the Xobni team!
Social Networking Advertising - It Will Be Even Harder than we Think
(not a product but a personal idea) ...

I wanted to build a google custom search engine, that indexes all the car sites (for each city etc..) - then make them all search-able from one box... This works for all items that someone would drive cross state for...

- I was afraid this might be used for malicious purpose so I haven't done it yet
Says in the article. Apr 1 2006. I suspect that was the first public demo, since they were WFP06 and so probably started around Dec 05 or Jan 06.
I think you nailed it with the line:
"they get a little street cred back in the hacker community for picking up a YC startup".

Exactly what I was thinking. If it's not the features, not the engineers, it must be the positive buzz they get for it. Probably this is some lame attempt by Microsoft to appear cool and show that they understand the new wave.
be as natural as possible.

Most natural (word of mouth)
Least natural (spam)

most success is probably somewhere in between
any company that is successful probably has decent marketing behind it
Indeed, a lot of the services touted as RESTful are less RESTful and more RPCish.

REST has certainly become a fad term that's used to hype that anti-SOAP juggernaut and that's led to a lot of confusion since so many of the folks doing the yapping don't really understand REST.

Your confusion (whether you've read Roy's dissertation or not) seems to be a fairly common one for people coming from an experienced RPC mindset. I had a similar conversation at SDWest after my talk on REST with a SOAPer -- he too was missing the point that terms like "document" and "resource" are much more abstract in REST than what the general English meaning implies -- particularly to people who's existing experience with RPC approaches like SOAP and CORBA before that gives them a very different and, arguably, much more concrete terminology for RPC.
This falls back to PG's "Bold VC's" essay -

this is the time for those bold VC's to make their move, are we going to see Ycomb spin off a Risk-ier fund?
Come on, building a working OS is a gigantic effort. Last time I checked Xobni was regex-ing phone numbers and names from e-mail texts, plus some fancy GUI of the kind that you said in one essay that you hate (messing around with obscure Windows APIs). Following your reasoning, the Xobni guys could have more easily built a full OS, which, with all respect, I seriously doubt.
DHH by far and that isn't to say the others weren't good, just that his was stellar by comparison. In other years PG might have won -- nothing wrong with it, it was pretty good, just that DHH was stellar.

Some of the top points for me (my interpretations):

1) Rails - first version was 1000 lines. You don't have to make something gargantuan that solves every problem as a first version!

2) Rails was a means to an end, something used in the process of making something REAL. It wouldn't work as a day job, it would be horrible to just work on a framework all the time.

3) If you only HAVE 2 hours a day, working on it is something to look forward to (my inference), whereas if you have all day every day you procrastinate. Don't expect yourself to work on it all the time, it's not realistic.

4) Reverse terror alerts -- SO much coverage given to the one in a million success stories that we subjectively feel it's much more likely than it is. We are brainwashed with overexposure. The odds are much better of building a small business, and of course there's nothing preventing you from selling that anyway. I suppose it's like flipping a house -- make it someplace nice and live in it and you can enjoy it, and that doesn't stop you from selling it later if you want. If you are focused on flipping it then it becomes kind of an albatross because you're too attached to a low-probability outcome that depends on other people, which makes you a bit desperate and unable to enjoy the process, which just becomes an interminable wait.

5) Calling the shots, running at your own pace -- not having to "yes, massa" and do what your investors tell you.

6) Having a bunch of small customers vs. one huge one means you don't have to placate some fussy demanding customer or risk losing the account and all your income. If a small customer isn't worth it, you can refund and let them go.
In the same time a feature idea for news.yc & reddit:

the number of votes on a comment should become visible only after someone voted already, similarly to online polls. This would prevent people from mindlessly agreeing with popular opinion, and in the same time it would encourage more people to vote, out of curiosity to see the result.
At the risk of my HN karma... Microsoft.

Think about it... For decades they have been able to create and leverage their monopolistic position in such a way as to get people to continue paying large margins for almost uniformly mediocre offerings.

ObAntiMS: I think history is validating my contention at the time that the Windows 95 era was the peak of MS's power. Alas, like any dinosaur, they take a long time to die.
You admire Microsoft's ability to "leverage their monopolistic position" through marketing? Isn't that the complete opposite of the very idea of marketing?

Most of their marketing is terrible, anyway. Vista did not make me say "Wow."
craigslist has an problem with anonymous posters. People often get ripped off because there is no good way to check on a persons reputation. Flugpo.com is trying to create a space where you can find out more about who the people are that you are trying to deal with.

Not a solution for all people but some people are more concerned with online safety then others.
Ah, I should have been more explicit.

Whether their marketing works on us "elitists" or not is irrelevant -- it works for the vast majority of people who actually pony up money for their products and services. That's admirable in the "excellent, first-rate" definition -- not in the "inspiring approval, reverence, or affection" way.

In fact, that kind of power is truly frightening to me -- akin to the scary power of elected officials and the bureaucratic juggernauts.

Also, you seem to be confusing their wretched advertising with "marketing". I totally agree that their ads suck.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. I know quite a lot of idea guys, and some that have been successful. And your bra-story is a good example.

The reason that I didn't want to include prototypes is that if you have one you're not selling the idea, but a lot of work. Often years of it.

I had an office at an incubator once, and every now and then there would be a story in the paper about someone from the incubator selling an idea and a prototype for a substantial amount. But knowing the people behind it I knew that they were selling years of work, not merely an idea. The bra-lady sounds like she is in the same category.
Regarding Microsoft... it really struck me when I watched Steve Ballmer talk with Guy Kawasaki ( http://visitmix.com/blogs/News/Watch-Steve-Ballmer-and-Guy-K... ) that Steve over and over again touted that it was important for them to get big into online advertising. Not once did he frame a single Microsoft goal in the form of how it was going to help a customer.
Wow, so they are a YC startup??
congratz to all people involved.
DIY Treadmill Desk: Exercise for the Sake of Hacking
Or, you know, call me crazy, but maybe they just think those would be good features to add to Outlook, and this is the easiest way to add them and keep them out of competitors' products at the same time.

Occam's razor?
It's scary how good the prose of some lispers is. I wonder what made Peter Norvig and Paul Graham write this well. "I am not claiming to be good. At best I speak good as a second language." is just brilliant.
Since there were three agents involved, and Simon Kinberg that sold the script already has done the sequel to XXX, mr. and Mrs. Smith, X-men, won screenwriter of the year etc. I think that the mid-six figures are based on an established track record of being able to produce successful scripts.

And note that he didn't sell an idea - he sold a script that he has to write. Which is around a years work.
> ...including one of a Viper Fish which I wish you could see. You would die laughing...

Upon reading this I immediately searched on Google Images for "Viper Fish". The power of the interwebs is overwhelming.
So are you saying that someone thinks of and idea - like a car powered by toenail clippings. They never do any research, they don't build a prototype, they don't even know if it will work but they want to sell the idea?
That sounds about right.

In my experience, angels don't usually think of themselves as "angel investors", and definitely wouldn't join any program like this one.
For an example of an organization that fits both the "excellent, first-rate" and "inspiring approval, reverence, or affection" definitions and has integrity...

craigslist

They live their marketing. Ala what PG was talking about in his talk yesterday w.r.t. Benevolence.
partially - what I mean is a feasible idea that is obviously good, and can be monetized. Google's pagerank algorithm would be a good example.

The reason I don't want to include prototypes (one-day mock-ups are fine) is that doing a prototype for your car powered by toe-nail clippings is a lot of work, and half the product. And then you're not selling an idea, but a partial product.
This article is nice, and I agree with the part about momentum gained by holding to greater values than simply building a successful company.

However, PG doesn't mention the incredibly successful startups that start out with evil/crime and then later go good: ones that start with spammy & unethical means to get initial users and pirated content startups.

I think most people strive to do good, but the world itself is a very evil place that sometimes needs adapting to.