skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great point. I was just watching some Saturday Night Live clips on NBC's web site. I was surprised that so many commercials one's forced to watch in their video area do not fit the mood of the site at all. Even on the Internet, when the commercials could be targeted better, they are not. This shows that traditional advertising networks that are transitioning to the Internet are still following the old approach, and it takes a new company to react to solve new problems and cater to Internet users rather than thinking of the Internet as a cheaper distribution source for traditional methods. Old media wants a "presence" on the Internet, new media lives and breathes the Internet, and is made up of regular people who are the stars to their social circle.
Are they? At least for my tech-oriented blog, the percentage of visitors using canvas-compatible browsers and the percentage with Java applets enabled is roughly the same. And the former is bound to get higher while the latter goes the other way. So for sites that have a high ratio of non-IE users that are concerned about subjecting those users to the various Java applet pains.
I agree with this somewhat. Traditionally businesses have been dependent on advertising or PR in order to promote their product, but increasingly there is value in inflitrating certain networks (e.g. early adopter crowd) so as to spread "virally". You could call this a new type of business promotion e.g. community adoption or maybe its just a new subset of PR, in which case, nothing much has changed.
Gosh, I cry when I hear such stories... Some pro people can't get any funding at all.
What are these "ads" everyone is talking about? :p
"It’s the theoretical limit."

What if you also know that the person who's googling for "Ford Focus" is of driving age? Like, uh, Facebook does.
Aka Flying Saucer
1. Facebook doesn't need to be bigger than Google to be successful. All they need to be is "profitable". Why do you think they need to be an order of magnitude bigger?

2. You're missing the distinction between brand advertising and action oriented advertising. When Budweiser advertises, their goal is to create an association in your brain that links them to something cool you like so that when you're in the bar you choose their product rather than another brand. How many people do you know search for "beer" on Google to choose which brand to buy?

3. Facebook does have aspects that allows them to get that order of magnitude of views you mentioned. For example, if I "fan" a Facebook Page, many of my friends will see that in their news feed. Probably not all 250 of them, but many.
I like the link.
what about less... me and my co-founder were talking and we were thinking that really for right now what we'd like is $50-100k between the 2 of us. So we can work on the project full time, relocate, and get any resources that we will need.
Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement
How To Reduce Bounce Rate Through Website Analytics and Usability
How To Reduce Bounce Rate Through Website Analytics and Usability
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – The Love Triangle
Information and technology are two industries that have the power to change the entire outlook of global business. These multi billion dollar industries are proving to be the bone of contention for industry leaders like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. The dogfight we have been seeing clearly indicates the vested interests of the industry leaders
25 powerful encryption tools you need to know about
I couldn't find the podcast on his site. Could you post a URL? Thanks!
I'm interested in playing with the Microsoft stack a bit more, for the usual reasons people play with languages they don't work with. Can anyone recommend a sweet spot to aim at (is ASP.NET MVC really usable yet?) and maybe a book or guide?

When I wrote a sample client to accompany a web service I'd developed, I used VS2005 and a Sams "ASP.NET in 24 hours" book. I suspect seasoned MS stack people would recommend something else.
As far as websites go younoodle.com is best one I have seen so far.

If you are at/around a uni look for a suitable society e.g. BASES at Stanford, OE at Oxford, Imperial Entreprenuers at Imperial.

If you can, attend hacker meets especially events like barcamp and some of the (un)conferences put on.
Depends what type of cofounder you are looking for. for hackers got to hacker meets, for business/other-skill go where these people hang out.
Idea...

Build what you can and then advertise you want a cofounder on what have built e.g. directly on your website.
That word, syndication, I do not think it means what you think it means
please clarify. not heard about this.
As LinkedIn is a professionals networking site, people probably take invitations recieved more seriously.
...but better money in transitioning them to more modern tech :)
you can get 50-100k from a few places: either 1 angel (it won't be a very big deal for them), family, or friends of family.
Is this the first ruling to establish that torrent files themselves are illegal in the USA?
Ask YC: Better to be a Specialist or a Generalist as a CEO?
I've been doing some self-evaluation recently, mainly as a consequence of talking with some very smart people about coming onboard with me on a new venture. I realised that I am very much a generalist potential CEO - I know a reasonable amount about marketing, sales, technology, finance, operations, business law and contract law - but can offer no deep, astonishingly insightful commentary on any of these.

What I seem to be able to do is tie these functions together coherently, run a team of smart people and get them pushing hard in a given direction and communicate a vision, or a strategy, or an idea, or a requirement in terms which appeal to the person on which I am focusing my attention.

But is that enough? What does the broader community think? Would my soon-to-be-real company be better served by having a specialist (Ops, Technical, Marketing) in the CEO chair? Is there a natural lifespan before either the generalist or specialist founding CEO needs to step aside?
If actions/controls are made obvious (intuitive) then you don't really need the wizards/assistants.
This is ridiculous. A million bucks will buy a mansion in dozens of out of the way locations in the US...just like it'll buy a mansion in some out of the way location in Sweden or Mexico or Italy.

Many first world European cities are also very expensive to buy real estate in. An apartment in Paris is not particularly cheap, even by New York or San Francisco standards. Par exemple, regarder this lovely 65m^2 (which I think means it meets all fuel efficiency standards) apartment right in the heart of Paris:

http://www.frenchentree.com/french-property/76373/Paris-Ile-...

That's 411k of them Eurodollars they got over there, which are worth like 6 bucks apiece, or something.
Yes, I find these most helpful too.
Networking is a rich source of potential co-founders, partners, employees and so forth. It's a chance to get to know like-minded people and for them to get to know you. It takes time and patience but can be worth it. As babul pointed out, go where the types of person you need hang out and learn to speak their language.

Advertising for a co-founder is another way to do it, but I have always thought that makes for a more formal business arrangement, rather than two (or more) people united by a passion for an idea. Perhaps I'm romanticising slightly, but if you advertise for a co-founder I think you will need to spend more time (and money?) on formulating a pretty tight Job Spec to make sure all requirements, dependencies etc are watertight. This may not actually be a bad thing, but you should be aware of it, all the same.
Does hacker news have a search facility or filters for finding/sorting threads.
Doesn't hacker news have any search facilities or filters for finding/sorting threads.

OK, I may be missing the obvious but cannot seem them. I especially want to sort threads that are posts to external material and those that are disccusions on the site.

Any enlightenment is appreciated.
I usually take "workaholic" in the Japanese sense--someone whose boss assigns them 12 hours of work to do in an 8 hour day, is culturally expected to complete it all, and has this view internalized to the point where they feel bad when they can't.
Wow, thanks! It's amazing to compare the reception of this article here versus Reddit. Over there, 700 people voted it DOWN, whereas here I'm being offered free beer.

I think I'll stick around!
OK just saw it was a highly requested feature yet to be done. Answered my own question :)
Game developers can't help it--basically, every title is a race to make the best use of the newest (to the point that anyone other than a game developer would call it "alpha") graphics technology. There's also almost never maitenance: 1.0 is final for console games, and usually final for anything else (no new features are ever added, only bug fixes.)

The only things that don't fit this model are MMOs (RPGs or FPSes) because their clients are dependably net-connected on large lines, the content is on the server under the company's control, and many people will still be "coming into" the game long after it is released, and continuing to pay money for the game, basically keeping it alive. I imagine Blizzard must think of WoW as relaxing and elegant work compared to their other titles.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95288 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152019
Specialist people don't always make the best CEOs. If you are able to create a kick-ass team ad share the vision, make things happen, and get things done, then I am sure you will be fine and do well.
I smell a rat. It's pretty common for spammers to create an account on public forums, let it sit for 30-60 days, and then come in and create a generic, link-bait style post which they later use to post links in (once the post has been around a while). The advantage is that Google indexes the page, gives it a high page rank due to the density and good content.

I just have a tough time believing that anyone who reads this site and techcrunch would ask such a question.
> generating post modernism essays in response to spam emails

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=152478
definitely need to go angel hunting soon. I know in my case family and friends aren't an option. neither have that kind of money (even if I could spread it out I couldn't work 1000 out of them).
http://www.venturehacks.com

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_truth_about.html

Read venturehacks in its entirety and pmarca's relevant posts.
Some email companies allow you to do A/B testing on-the-fly. For a list of 10,000 users, they'll send out 100 of subject line "A" and 100 of subject line "B". They'll pause, wait to see what the reaction is, and then send the remaining 9800 emails using whichever was shown to be the most popular. I don't know if that helps you but it's how companies with budgets/time do it.
If you are going to take a job in which one of the requirements is migrating COBOL apps, your skills will not transfer to a new job; you're just going to waste your time learning a dead language. If you're just graduating, a huge lesson to learn is that you should take jobs that, all else being equal, allow you to advance your career. Ask yourself: "Is having COBOL on my resume going to help me over the next 30 years?"

Life is long, you are young, and the decisions you make today affect the rest of your life (perhaps more now than in five years).
Even if the problem of generalized natural language understanding were solvable - which I doubt -, my bet would be on Peter Norvig and the Google team solving it way before the Facebook guys.
I use RescueTime only on work (Windows) and do not use it at home (linux), so my stats look similar despite the fact that i spend ~40% of my time on linux applications.
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Bulk SMS Solutions in a blink's time
Rupiz Media has unveiled a power packed bulk SMS delivery software solution, compatible with miscellaneous widgets including Pocket PC, PDA and smart phones, to suit the requirements of multiple businesses.
Something helpful to remember is the shift from broadcast to cable TV as a true innovation in advertising. Where the former meant huge audiences (this year's Superbowl still trailed the 100 million that watched the final episode of MASH in 1983), it also meant significantly fewer targeted ads, except for some time periods (detergents begat soap operas) and events (beer begat Bud Bowl). Cable allowed channels to become really geared to demographics and thus ads. It's an example where the long tail of content is quite valuable. Take Scripps Networks (Food, HGTV, DIY) - that's quite a sizable chunk of what folks consume on a weekly basis.

To many, the internet advertising model takes the cable approach and amplifies the number of channels. The difference with Google is they understood how clicks were the next generation game changer (and well ahead of their time). Yahoo had always focused on aggregating content. They were following a shotgun path that had proven very valuable (cable TV) when clicks were finally used to create a sniper's rifle for aiming ads.
The future role of public service broadcasting by Stephen Fry
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Kobol
How can I analyze all this data?
Xkcd Style WEP Cracking in Real Life
If your app requires real thought to use, make sure help is available on every page. A button that says, instead of "Help," "How do I get started?" or "What do I do now?" can aide the new user. Name the buttons after the kinds of questions real users ask when getting to that page.

Also, I second the idea of contextual tooltips for everything.

Finally, a "quick-start" guide is not a bad idea. Make it in bullet-list form, just to set the frame-of-mind of the user.
Don't Build the Super Nifty Node System
The fundamental problem is that natural language processing (NLP) isn't one problem to be solved. There will be many solutions to many particular problems of NLP. Many, many years later we're still waiting for one solution to energy (steam, or coal, or nuclear...?) or one solution to flight (gliders, or jets, or rockets...?). Human intelligence is a swiss army knife where the tools developed millions of years ago (opposable thumbs) or evolved withing ten years (keyword-based search). Why should there be a general solution?

Google has taken a sizeable chunk. But what's interesting to me is search has become all-consuming for them. Many solutions are perfectly fine for search, but that perspective (aggregating large noisy datasets) won't help much in other areas (e.g., individual voice recognition). If anything it will be a big waste of time trying to shoehorn every NLP problem into that search-based rubric. That leaves a lot of room for little guys cranking through data to produce new, and unique, NLP tools (e.g., Dragon Naturally Speaking). More to your point: I have yet to see a scientific hire by Facebook away from Google. It's been all business and marketing from what I've seen in the popular press.
Lijit’s CEO on raising money from angels
Actually, a previous company I worked at does have to move away. They have what they believe was one of the largest VB6 apps anywhere. It had its own embedded VBA as well. Now they have an enforced rewrite, and yes, it didn't mean it stops working that day, but they have licenses for VBA which they pass on to customers which DO expire (as in, they can't keep selling their product!). Now they have to move years of work and history to something new. So yes, real companies are real screwed by the decision.

If Microsoft applies the same practice to ASP.NET some day, and a buffer overrun exploit is found, what are your alternatives?
Neither.

I think you want to be "angular", which (not surprisingly) is what the Ivy's are looking for too.

Angular means having a few elements of true specialization and mastery, but being a reasonable generalist everywhere else.
"Where to go? This is the easiest question to answer: Bangkok."

I like the fact that your article has "smart" features :-)
Online advertising is heavily weighted towards direct sales. I haven't used facebook that much but from the ads I've noticed, I don't see much branding happening - they're all looking to get clicks and convert sales.
>>> I think an acquisition of Facebook won't happen, partly because I don't think Zuckerberg is interested in selling, and that's why the sale didn't go through before when MS and Yahoo offered over a billion.

The sale didn't go through BECAUSE they offered him one billion. I'm sure if they came along with more a couple of years ago, he would have sold.

Personally, I hope they IPO. That stock will be amazing to short after the IPO pushes the stock price at least 50% higher than it should be.
Good article, but entirely extracted from the original at:
http://falseprecision.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/05/angel-fi...

Why not link directly to this one?

Daniel
NLP
NLP is a technology for modeling the genius of high performers. In the 30 years since it's birth in Santa Cruz, it has become a key technology in business, management, marketing, and athletics. Grinder and Bandler published many influential NLP books in the 1970's and each continued to develop nlp in different directions since that time. In recent years, other influential contributers such as Judith Delozier and Robert Dilts, have influenced and impacted the field of NLP. Many self improvement authors have taken these tools to the masses. Some ideas about resuppositions from linguist George Lakoff influenced the field of Nlp early on, though he was never a part of the field. Lakoff's ideas of "framing" have made deep inroads into progressive political discourse.
Earliest Known American Settlers Harvested Seaweed
If you have to look at it in the context of a team. If you are hiring folks for your management team, select people with skills that will complement you, i.e. people with great depth in Technology, operations and marketing in your case.

If you are getting hired, understand the gaps and fill them accordingly.
Where search wins is with intent.

Search implies intent. Better than anything else.

All of the LBS (Location Based Services) haven't figured this out yet, but Location does NOT imply intent. Walking past a pizza store does not mean I'm hungry for pizza.

The question for Facebook is whether any data that they possess does a reasonable job of implying intent. It doesn't have to do as well as search, but it has to do well enough.

The question boils down to "what do you do on facebook that implies intent". The status may be one of the only things.
OEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a video or picture URL o
I'll admit it's certainly based on a little conjecture. The post-WWII 'Product Era' supported by marketing evolved into the Brand or 'Positioning Era'; one of business frameworks I use for work (I'm a Shirlaws Business Coach) tracks revenue through a business, starting with Product, then Positioning, then Distribution (ie, of product to market).

But this does fit into emerging trends, both online (Facebook) and off ('baby boomer community' returns 5.3 million pages in Google, but no ads...)
http://www.searchyc.com/

Not internal, but excellent.
Same thing applies. Getting funding for two guys and a concept is much harder than two guys and a prototype.
"... Converts the canvas to a binary image ..."

Just realised that in fox3 right mouse click on the canvas allows you to save the image as a .png
Let me try again:

I have a free invite. Tweet me.
though, a combination of clean/browntech seems to refer to anything energy related, except the traditional, like building an oil refinery.
The skill that you must be a specialist at is leadership. You can hire finance specialists, IT specialists, legal specialists, etc. The ability to lead during the peaks and valleys of any business, not just a startup, is what you are being hired for as a CEO.
I don't believe one is necessarily better than the other, though different businesses at different stages of their lifecycle will definitely need different style CEOs.

Broadly, I tell CEOs I deal with that there are only three things they need to focus on:

Managing in Context (ie, the bigger purpose)

Coach don't Play

Managing the Energy in your Business
I don't understand the downmodding, this is a serious problem. What if someone started marketing an adblocker to the internet unsavvy?
> it took forever for MS to catch up to open source with LINQ

Sorry to go off-topic, but what were they catching up to exactly? I wasn't aware of anything LINQ-like in open source (not that I'm always aware of these things).
If I hadn't come up with it, someone else would have. Pure Lisp was a discovery, everything that has been done with it since has been an invention

For me , this pretty much sums it up--thank you for posting ;)
MetaASO: A Bootstrapped P2P Startup From India
Google discontinues Hello
That answer could also be phrased as "both".

And I agree. You need to be ok at most things and really amazing at a couple.

My specialties are technology/coding and writing, but I'm also a competent consultant with the associated skills in management, negotiation, presentation, networking and business analysis, and since quitting my job have also acquired decent skills in online marketing.

Not everyone in your company needs to be competent in so many areas, but I'd suggest the CEO needs to be. At the same time, there needs to be at least one thing the CEO brings to the table that others aren't as amazing at as he or she is. Later on, when the company becomes larger, who the CEO attracts to work at the company becomes more important than what skills they bring in, but at the early stage everyone in the company needs to be amazing at something, and be involved in using that skill to create an amazing version 1.0.

Daniel
Mind Control by Cell Phone
This is how you do it, but don't send 100 and then a 100, use a much bigger sample size to make sure you are climbing up the hill correctly. In other words, do A/B testing in a highly statistically significant manner until you find what works for your service. You can grab things from other sites like Linked In to try to climb up the hill faster.
Guaranteed Messaging with Comet
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184707 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=182374 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183706 for command line search and current data.
Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator
Sheep Or How Google is destroying the internet
If you don't use the mouse a lot, it's easy to just set the keyboard in your lap.

The thing I hate about leaning back this far is having to bend your neck forward to see the monitor.
For a site search, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=184707
this should be on the front page
A planeful of programmers went down and there was nothing left to identify except body parts.

An official held up an arm and a woman cried, "That's my husband, John, the php programmer! I can tell from the watch I bought him for his birthday."

Then he held up a leg and another woman cried, "That's my husband Bill, the C++ programmer! I can tell from the shoe I bought him for his birthday."

Then he held up a head and a third woman cried, "That looks like my husband Joe, the Java programmer, but he was much taller than that."
Squeak Etoys - Students Build Their Own Games In Four Days
The computer model that once explained the British economy
Is AJAX On The Way Out?