skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Web 2.0 is becoming convoluted with me-too-variants, it's the same thing that happened toward the end of 1.0. Early-adopters and technocrats see past the distortion, but your mass-consumer does not. Growth for middle-to-late comers does not match that of the early 2.0ers for which they've structured their model around...

In many cases, these socially focused applications/sites are caught in a whirl-pool... interest trickles-in and trickles-out, making it difficult to self-sustain the business, particularly when it relies on the end-user for content. While Twitter is doing well now, I believe they suffered a full year paddling against this traffic current.

In addition, I feel there are too many startups trying to encompass everything-social shooting for that big valuation; focus on low-commitment reward for the end user and get the data later. Rolling out with with a stage set for 10,000,000 makes adoption intimidating, and makes your infrastructure costs a significant burden.

3.0 will see an increase in service-oriented applications and hopefully a rise in XMPP whereby data of interest comes to you, you don't go to it... With all the major communication networks moving over to Jabber, it's shaping to be the next secondary telecom-market. I believe Facebook is poised early to make a move here, as they are mirroring GTalks success integrating with GMail. The beauty of Jabber is that it's essentially universal and real-time, so services can be network-agnostic (ie: AIM, MSN, Gtalk, etc..). Think communication-bot on steroids.

A tech recession is normal and welcoming TBH. It filters out some of the pollution and with a globalized market, there's an abundance of it..
What aneesh and yourself are saying is coming eerily close to discussions we've been having recently... thanks for the feedback guys, very much appreciated!
DHH: Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?
I found it a fascinating article, and also skipped 2/3 of it.

Summary: memory decays exponentially, (e ^ -t) but slower with each repetition (e ^ -0.5t). So there is a sweet spot for timing repetitions, and it can be calculated if you store past data, which makes memorization much more efficient.
That it was
For people with trouble streaming -

http://www.grooveshark.com/blog/2008/04/22/update-grooveshar...
(on reading..)stopping the instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension falls too low and then moving on to the next item in the queue.

brilliant idea in itself. (bought a copy at $19)
Should I be suspicious of those glowing reviews, given as the article says, "[the] problem here, from the psychologists' perspective, is that the user's sense of achievement is exactly what we should most distrust"?
Hi tyohn, how do we contact you? We'd love to talk further to explore this idea.

Mark
Strange - I was on the verge of discovering this for myself for my own language site. I'm already storing the data, but hadn't started with the number crunching yet.

On another note - isn't it scandalous how inefficient education is? Cramming all those mind-numbing details in your brain the night before an exam, and then forgetting 70% of them after a couple of months. Ridiculous and wasteful.
Sketch Programming: A Precursor to Test Driven Development
Just concentrate on your product.

It's fine to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, but you want to use that as a source of ideas and inspiration, not as a way to defeat yourself before you're even out of the gate. The competitors may not be able to release as early or often. Everything might fall through for them. Or, maybe, they'll be successful, and you'll be successful, because there's room in the market for more than one company.

You shouldn't be afraid of competition, you should embrace it as an opportunity to be challenged to produce an even better product than you would have.

So, I say just focus on your product. Make it the best, most mold-shattering product you can. If you can do that, and keep on doing that, then at the very least your potential competitors are going to have to spend a lot of energy just trying to keep up with you.
I love this article and wish there was more like it--thanks for posting.

I also wish Piotr Wozniak would write a book (even though he'd probably consider it a waste of time). Work like his is so important, and positive, and humanitarian. Even if he's just doing what he enjoys, I believe we're all the better for it.
Duct tape saved Apollo 17 moonbuggy, while on the moon
Just joking! :)
His first argument seems to do more with the teams themselves than the surrounding area. Temptation is found anywhere, whether it's a big office in the bay area, a huge flat in Chicago, or me supersizing my McDonald's combo #2. If you're not disciplined with your money, you're bound to fail regardless of location. Sounds like he's making a generalization about programmers, too.
I wonder if Hulu doesn't have to pay the content owners until it's out of Beta?

I know that if I had that sort of thing in my agreements I'd be in beta for a looooooooong time :)
The smart businesses know you don't want to be in San Francisco - there are too many distractions. You want to be somewhere lame, like San Carlos, so that people don't have anything to do besides work.

edit: I guess I should have added the ";)" JUST KIDDING!
I'd say Lisp is more valuable to me as a self improvment tool than as a development environment
The boat has its meaning.
Ocean == web,
sailor = surfer,
finding diamond = finding important resources,
means with the help of a fuse a surfer can find important resources of the Web for a particular topic.
----
Name also has its meaning
1)Fuse == Fusion == which means getting things together at one place we used this term as we are putting up all the important bookmarks of topic at a commonplace.
2)http is usually associated with the URL.
because of which we named it as httpfuse.
Ask YC: now my site is done, what next?
I have pretty much completed development/testing and launch my site. What is next? Should I submit a press release, how to get everyone on it? The target audience of my site isn't anyone around me. My site isn't doing strange new things (or around facebook) that could possibly get coverage on web 2.0 blogs like techcrunch. What other options do I have?
That would be remarkably good retention. I guess it's way worse than that on average, at least for stuff crammed once with no more interest than passing an exam.

Back to the main point: yes, school is very inefficient, but I think the problem of student apathy and disinterest for the subject matter is in more urgent need of fixing than retention itself.
Vitamin Features: Developing with Google App Engine, Part I
You could start by giving us the link.
Hi Mark, I added my email to the about section in my YC profile. Feel free to email me.
Not only that, but the biggest problem with CNN.com is THE LACK OF CONTENT!

Yeah their site isn't the most horrible of the bunch. However, content is always more important than how it looks. I stay away from major news websites for the most part, but I like msnbc.com a lot. They have a customized version for the iphone, a LOT more content, and a decent site design.

Hell, what's sad is that even Foxnews.com has better tech and science content than CNN.
"It's stupid to think that the #2 social network is worth 30 times the #1 social network, but it'd also be dumb to wholly discount the value of all of that data."

I agree. To me it seems like the data that one enters into their profile in Facebook is much more organized and uniformly formatted than the train wreck that comprises most Myspace pages. Facebook also one-ups Myspace by making users prove that certain data is true, for example using email confirmations to verify which school they go to.

The bottom line, though, is that none of us know exactly how much data is being aggregated by Facebook (ie. are they tracking things such as profile trends by logging changes in each user's likes/dislikes section?). Just like Peter Norvig explained at SS, the real value doesn't lie in the code, or in this case the application itself, but in the amount/value of data collected. The trick is just finding the right way to manipulate that data to yield the highest value/most profitable data for their investors. And something tells me that Facebook, and its investors, already know this.
I gently dispute your "bunch of Lisp programmers from MIT" characterisation...

You mean as a characterization of you... or as a characterization of the folks who founded ArsDigita, which is what I intended?

In either case, a gentle disputation is probably justified. :)
This is great advice. Platform Security is a system unto itself and language-neutral. In fact, Symbian-C++ is quite an old dialect. Series-60 is by far the most prolific Symbian-based platform and well worth understanding even if you are not programming to those APIs.
No no, step 2 is PRICE. Haven't you been keeping up with the hype of the week?
I agree. I live in Grass Valley, in the Sierra foothills. Turns out, we've got a solid little tech base here, in a rural area. I never wanted to go the VC route, so the conditions here have made it much easier for me to bootstrap as a consultant, and make lots of professional connections.

In my case, I'll ultimately be more successful starting out here, than I think I would have in the Bay Area.
Hulu is out of beta already. This article is about 2 months old...
Bluh. Dunno about you, but I get badly demotivated if all I'm doing is working.
DHH talked about lifestyle at Startup camp, and lifestyle is the key reason to want to be in San Francisco. It is simply a great City to live in with the added benefit that almost any escape to the natural world, like skiiing, sailing, etc etc, is immediately available. The downside is some added cost, but the costs here are comparable to Southbay locations and other major Cities. So if you want to build a sustainable business with a lifestyle that you want to enjoy for the long-term, San Francisco is an ideal location.
Thanks for the input everyone. I think I'll go for launching as soon as possible and start revising from there, with community direction, if I can build a community that is!

Much appreciated.
I'd be interested in this too, I'll have to face this stage soon and would like to start reading up on it.
slightly cocky, comming from a startup that depends on other startups being able to hire.

For every 6 crappy ideas not being funded, might a good one that unfortunately might not be funded as well.

And it is crazy thinking that overrall economy and investors' sentiments don't matter. What if in 3-4 years the economy is still not fully recovered, and your company is running out of cash?
What if you want to exit?
A lot of companies that cashed out around 2002-2003 were undervalued, because such was the sentiment right then. Rottentomatoes sold for something like 10million (don't remember the exact sum), and if it waited few more years it probably will have fetched a lot more.

We don't know how long, and how bad this downturn will be, this is just the beginning.
There are two kinds of companies:

The first defines themselves in terms of their (perceived) competition. A great example of this has been Sun. McNealy spouted out incessantly against Microsoft even though Sun's actual primary competitors were IBM and HP (while the true threat was the systemic commodification brought on by PCs and F/OSS).

The second defines themselves by the value that they actually deliver to their customers. Craigslist is a poster child for this in the online space.

In terms of the market perception, you should think a bit about who's going to be perceived as the driver/leader of your market and who's going to be perceived as the "me too" player.

In terms of market validation, it's almost always a good thing that you have some competition. For Krugle, we nominally have a fair number of competitors on the surface (including Google) but our actual product blows them away.

In terms of war chests (money), that's an open question. It depends on how creative you can be, how stupid (or not) they are because they have money, whether or not they can actually use the money to their advantage, etc.
I totally agree.

The thing that I'd add is that the OP should first get feedback on the app from everybody they know to get them through that first round or two of cruft and get some user-directed focus.
Likewise. Sorry about that.
Yes, a Press Release would be a good place to start.

Also look for any news/media outlets that might be related to whatever industry or vertical this mysterious site falls under and submit either a PR or "introduction" email to those places.

Comment (intelligently!) on blogs related to users that have an interest in whatever it is your site is offering. Provide a link back to your site (obviously).

DON'T try "link exchange" or "link farm" type sites as a mechanism for promoting your site. These have very little positive impact and a huge potential negative impact in terms of SEO.
press release, target your niche and advertise to it. find blogs and get them to review the service. basically, get the word of mouth out there as best as you can. SEO SEO SEO.
The Cloud Computing Strategy from Jeff Bezos
Quality travel information on the web is not even that good, in general, for an average web surfer. Type anything like "Hawaii hotels" into google and you're slammed with websites filled with ads. Or even add "reviews" to your search and you still get junk. There are a few good websites with real user submitted content (I forget which websites), but this is an areas where the adsense spammers seem to be winning.

So, it is sad to see that guidebooks are suffering, since that was generally a somewhat reliable place to get info for being a tourist.
Mike Arrington at Startup School 08
you make an excellent point. Most mailing lists I use have public archives and my email address is all over the web, yet I still feel the urge to obfuscate it where I can. maybe I should be less paranoid.
San Francisco is an interesting place. I live in SF, and I know a lot of programmers (and other tech workers) who live in SF, but I doubt that more than a third of them actually work in SF proper. Most of us engage in long and soul destroying drives to sterile office buildings in the midst of pedestrian-unfriendly parking lots on the peninsula and in the south bay. And we pay a lot for the privilege.

I think that other cities, like Portland, Seattle, Austin in the US (and maybe Barcelona, Copenhagen internationally) might actually be better places to work.

I wouldn't leave SF, but I grew up here and have family around. If I were starting out, I'd definitely consider other cities.
I'd suggest having something which explains that the idea is you think of the answer and then tell the computer whether you were right. It took me a while to randomly click "Show answer". I figured that was just for when I gave up.
I'm running low traffic blogs at about 15mb each with fastcgi on my server.
Doh!

That's what I get for not watching much tv :)
I found the following talk from Startup School '08 interesting since I'm in the very same position.

"Mike Arrington speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get, and how to respond to press for your startup."

http://omnisio.com/startupschool08/mike-arrington
But they can take the many movies you rate, find people who rate similarly (which may be way closer to your taste than your friends') because of the large data set.

Making money off of it and justifying a $15 billion valuation does require a lot more than for some people to prefer it.

Also, even if they did beat Netflix at recommendations, how does that monetize?
I don't understand the argument that "less investment means only the better companies will get funded." At best, you would have to say "less investment means only the better companies [according to VC's] will get funded". VC's are probably better at picking companies than disgruntled entrepreneurs admit, but all of them clearly fund more failures that successes.

But I think the most likely result is that "less investment means that only the safer bets will get funded." If there is a general economic downturn and fewer opportunities for a big exit (from either buyout or IPO), than I would think that VC's would get more conservative.

The other key indicator will be the health of the online ad market; if it collapses than you can expect the entire VC/startup ecosystem to collapse. This is why Google's earnings last week were such good news. But even if a downturn in the ad market does happen, maybe that won't be such a bad thing - then everyone would have to listen to DHH!
Would you sell life equity?
As a Silicon Valley resident who has lived in an inexpensive place, I think you have to be more disciplined with your money and time if you live in the Bay Area.
I love the bay area. DHH has a point, but for the wrong reasons. The VC/Web 2.0 echosphere is easy to ignore. The simple reason it is hard to start a business in the Bay Area without investment is because it is so expensive.
Andrew Chen: Moving to SF and joining the startup community - lessons from my first year
Are you sure you want to listen to someone who has never lived in San Francisco?

How can you measure the benefits of being around people and businesses that are similar? Its possible to trade stocks anywhere, but why do companies setup in New York or London?

If you don't want to take someone else's money to build your business, then don't. If you lived in Las Vegas would you automatically become a gambler?
If crazy growth, outside investment, and M&A are your goals, being in the Valley is the place to be. Especially if you are aiming for a consumer app. No question.

If you're going the "DHH path" (profitable lifestyle business, limited outside investment), it probably doesn't matter much.
And btw, from what I have see so far YC seems to be a great place to launch. You get lots of early adopters who don't mind seeing a few broken links and are willing to give very pertinent feedback.
There are a lot more chicks in other cities. This might assist founders during the low points of a startup.
The article is not about a strategy but about a Wired journalist fawning over Bezos.
There was a commercial that had something to do with insurance or something, where families were traded like stocks on an exchange.

There have been numerous occasions where I've thought about making something like this. How do you determine the value of a person or family? Would people be open to exposing so much details about their lives in order to increase the "value" of their family/person (like a public company has to open their books)?
The only person I can think of who is a level above anybody else is Patrick Collison. Everyone else is just in the game, and that's the most important thing. It's easy to think, why the hell did a startup get funded? However, VC's have to invest--it's their job--because the money will be lost due to inflation. And they can't invest in one company, they have to diversify. So if a group of young people with a revenge of the nerds attitude and no other commitments are willing to move to California and work harder than anybody else, and in the software field, no less, then what other choice do VC's have than to invest?

Young people (less commitments, more optimism) make up a small portion of the population. Good programmers make up a small portion as well. Those willing to relocate (California), also. Those who are willing to dedicate themselves to doing a startup for multiple years, tiny. So when you find an individual who has all of these qualities, and as part of a bigger group, you're now talking a very tiny, tiny portion of the country. And VC's have no choice but to invest in you.
Yea really it is a great question. The valuation is one aspect. The other is the fact that your incentive to succeed goes down once you get money so the very moment you get it, you're expected future earnings go down.

It's fascinating to think about though.
The reason why ACS was any good was because AOLServer was an awesome multithreaded webserver with a great API. Tcl was only there because it was the easiest language to embed into a multithreaded app at the time (now that distinction goes to lua). I'm not sure the Tcl code in the ACS was a good example of anything... in places it was as bad as the worst Perl script you have seen. (I know, I probably wrote 20% of the codebase.)
Huh? Support resources? Preparation?

Enterprise past life, eh?

Just get it out there already.

:)
I'm not quite sure I understand what advantages are lost by sharding -- would you mind elaborating?

As far as being able to write parallel queries, this is perhaps true, but you have to manage the parallelization, synchronization, and all other manner of nastiness. For data that doesn't require frequent updates (like Google), this may be a better route, but for systems where consistent data is important, I would much rather rely on years' worth of RDBMS research. It's not a matter of a lack of creativity; rather, I would prefer to spend my time solving problems as they are related to my application, not duplicating the bits of an RDBMS that aren't present in SimpleDB.

I find point (c) to be a bit surprising -- SQL is based around the concepts of set theory, and works in a fairly straightforward fashion. While there are differences between implementations, you certainly don't have to 're-learn everything' when you switch vendors, and the basic tasks of database management are not terribly complicated.

And yes, I regularly bounce between about three different SQL implementations (Postgres, MySQL, and SQLlite). Spent some time with Sybase as well, and I am not a DBA. There are differences, definitely, but it never took me more than a day or two to get up to speed, and I am not a genius by any stretch of the imagination.
It wouldn't necessarily even have to beat it -- you could use synergy.

For example: here are movies a bunch of your friends are watching, and here's how much we estimate you'll like each one. Or, to flip it around, out of all the movies we think you'll like, here are the ones that have the strongest buzz amongst people you know.

Anything that gets people excited about watching movies is good for Netflix, and should be something they can monetize.

You could do the same thing with YouTube videos, or with a music service. Instead of having people send you a bunch of annoying "Hey check this out" messages (by whatever messaging medium), you could look at a widget that shows the current favorites amongst your friends. Sure, a Netflix-style rating service may be more accurate, but a lot of people want to know what their friends recommend.
I'm in Buenos Aires.
The cost of living here it's 1/6 compared to San Francisco. And we have a lot of talent, cheap bandwidth and resources (apple Computers, big linux community, etc).
Also, real state its growing fast.
If you are planing to visit BA, msg me! :)
I won't try to justify the $15B valuation. That's obviously speculative. I just agree with Paul Buchheit that there's interesting potential in the social graph.

Back to netflix, I do think the anti-social graph will work better for some people, especially independent thinkers whose tastes haven't changed lately. For others, what movie they want to watch may depend on what movies their friends want to watch. Or they might have a change in taste correlated to a change in social circle. In those cases the social graph would work better.

To monetize, friendfeed could charge commissions for "get it now" links. They could sell ad space that is as lucrative as search ads.
15 of the Best Green Search Engines
I think it's kind of funny that this post mentions nothing about, you know, actually building a product.