skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wasn't a dismissal. I would strongly disagree with
isn't any easier to measure on the web than elsewhere though. If I place an ad on a site that results in 16 clicks which result in 4 transactions out of an audience of 32, I have a mathematical percentage of the effectiveness of my ad placement. This is possible on any ad placement on the web.

If I run the same ad on tv or print, I have nowhere near the ability to accurately attribute any delta in sales activity to that specific ad run at that specific point in time.
Your mailbox is not filtered for spam then?

If you have a blog, you do not prevent or delete comment spam?
Honestly, because of where I am in life right now (poor college student) I would choose the profitable one. I think if I did though, I would look back at the end of my life and wish I had done differently. The idea is to do the profitable thing first, then use my newfound wealth and free time to pursue the creative things.

As for your puzzles, I really enjoy them, and I think they do have a profitable potential. My suggestion is to rethink the marketing of them. Don't call them games. Turn them into "brain exercises" or something of the sort (consider Nintendo's "Brain Age" line of games, for example). Clean up the site a little (no background image, remove or reorganize the adsense boxes) and consolidate the games you've created to that site. Let other people submit games or "Brain Exercises" and then when you've reached a good amount of traction, sell to Tickle.

Sure, this is an off-the-cuff example, but the bottom line is that I think that with a little more creativity, you can do both the creative and profitable thing at the same time.

P.S., I personally don't like the background images. I think you posted earlier asking if you should include them, so here's more feedback on that.
Facebook Back of the Envelope Calculation I
Creative. Money has very quick diminishing returns.
Not so much a social network for programmers, but programmer collaboration.

Also, GitHub doesn't have the project management tools SourceForge has for things like tickets.
Why must we take such extreme sides?
Life is all about balance, so why not profitable creativity?
I thought I did in the first comment. It's hard to get all your friends to move with you at the same time to a new social network. Not that it can't happen, everything is replacable. It's just much harder than replacing google, because with Google I can switch on my own.
It is definitely sometimes the answer. You wouldn't like News.YC if spam submissions weren't "censored," for example.

Though in fact I do have a new plan for dealing with cases like Valleywag (suggested by Nick Grandy of Wundrbar): instead of simply banning linkbait sites, I'm going to try semi-banning them by requiring them to get more points to make it onto the frontpage. That sounds right: they're semi-spam, so semi-ban them.
Obviously, YC == 5943
What exactly are facebook users consuming?

And volume is no substitute for probability if every "consumption" is at a loss. Sony can sell the PS3 at a loss because it makes money on the games and in the long run, wins. They can't sell the PS3 at a loss and sell the games at a loss, and make up for it with volume.

That's what facebook seems to be attempting. And they're not even winning the volume game.
I noticed this happening in my blog's logs months ago, for my blog's search form. I thought it was fascinating. The keywords it chose to search were generally meaningful words that occurred frequently on the site. I'm not sure if they were correlated with the Google search terms that hit my blog.

The corresponding SEO tip is to make sure that your site's search feature works, delivers good results for the keywords and delivers the results to which you want Google to pay attention.
If you find a great story there you've absolutely got to share, maybe you could look at this as an opportunity to find a second source for it.
I thought pg was god-like for quite a while. And then I came out for the first Silicon Valley Startup School and met him the day before. He was wearing a necklace with a diamond-encrusted "PG" pendant. At that moment, I knew he was merely human.
If I wanted to advertise something online, there's no way in hell I'll pay for views. I'd only pay if someone clicked through to my site/service.
Vista's UAC security prompt was designed to annoy you
Understood. Me too. But we're not Ford, or <insert huge consumer company here>. Those companies are often paying for brand awareness on TV. They might be satisfied with (and might actually have the goal of) trying to get the average FB college student to buy a Ford five years from now when they buy their first car. And in that case, they don't really care about clicks now.
I think it was a rhetorical question.
Blatant spam should obviously be censored, but Valleywag is not "spam." There is at least a sliver of good content over there, and it's on topic.

I like the idea of requiring sites like XKCD, Valleywag, TechCrunch, and others to get more votes to make it to the front page. When that's implemented, will you then un-ban Valleywag?
It's a really well-written and interesting article Sumon, thanks.
you're giving ownership to people who don't care enough about what you do in particular to spend time on it

At the interview stage all we've seen is an application form with 120-word answers, and maybe a demo. And we're interviewing 50-60 groups over 3 days. It's not that surprising that we don't know in great detail what each plans to do. But once we accept a group, we spend a lot of time talking about the product with them-- literally down to the shapes of buttons.

And this is true with groups that have already launched just as much as those that haven't. In any startup, most development happens after launch. Every (good) startup is sans ideas 6 months in, compared to what they'll eventually do.
Here's this great thing you made

The mistaken assumption shows in the use of the past tense. The fact that a product's launched doesn't mean it's done. In most startups, most of the work happens after launch.
Ask YC: Co founder doesn't believe in product idea
My co founder (a programmer) discovered a competing product today and completely lost faith in our product. Saying he can't create a better product than the one he found. He also said he doesn't want to reinvent the wheel.

I'm discouraged and am thinking about finding a new co founder. The prospect of trying to find someone to make this product with me is daunting.

Does anyone else have this problem? Where you have a co founder and you feel like they can do great work but you feel like you are dragging them along for the ride?

I would appreciate any advice.
To be fair, we also spend a lot of time admiring each others shiny brilliance here at News.YC.
As one who nearly drowned in that tar pit a few years back, I have few insights.

1) Your product needs to be an order of magnitude better than your competitors in order to get users to switch. There is a reason craigslist, despite its obvious flaws, has not had a serious competitor.

2) If your product is not an order of magnitude better, design will not make much of a difference. Usability can, but not as much as you'd think. Many companies have produced a better evite, but none have gained the traction they deserve.

3) Right now, if you count on local merchants to purchase advertising, you might as well wait until hell freezes over. There's a whole set of entrepreneurs in the world who don't understand the internet and took their hard earned money to open up small bricks-and-mortar stores. Go to a website like Yelp or Menupages (both have substantial local market page views). You'll find almost no local ads, despite the fact that local businesses stand to benefit enormously from purchasing them.

I hope you figure it out. Someone has to rescue us from the mediocrity of most local websites. Might as well be you. :-)
Asking participants is not a great way to judge an activity's value, due to our natural biases. The study mentioned below comes to mind. That said, I suspect the value is high.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Empirical_...
What I was reffering to, is a topic being posted on YC (say, should Valleywag be banned ...) and then it is linked to by both Techcrunch and SAI, and then that article written about the original post (say, should Valley wag be banned ...) is posted back on news.yc

Remember opposite day?
Ask YC: How would you describe the Internet to someone who has ZERO computer knowledge?
A similar question was asked in a recent Viget post and I thought it would be interesting to discuss.
Book recommendation: The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar. He's a partner at KPCB, but he warns against taking the "deferred life plan."

I am loathe to call any Harvard Business School Press book "life changing" but this is one that does open your eyes. I met him in person when I graduated from college, and it really made me think about the entire make money then pursue creative things thing.
How is that not censorship? You aren't such a hardliner after all, are you?
What would you say is the common theme between say Dropbox (http://getdropbox.com) and Songkick (http://songkick.com)?
The problem with the social network is that it's more personal than search. Search, while personal, can be made innocuous by keeping annonymous information.

The holy grail of the social graph is to find out who the viral supernodes are. By that measure it's no surprise they went straight for the purchase history. If you can pinpoint the people who most influence other people you've got the potential for a very powerful statistic which can be fed into a viral marketing campaign.
R u into bloging?or bloggers?
come join bloggersmosaic.com
Arrington doesn't really like Valleywag. Also, I think he does really like Hacker News. This post represents the synergy of those two personal interests.
If you're serious, bootstrap.

Does Google count as serious to you? They took investor money. Practically every successful startup does.
I can't trust any article that says Microsoft's investment gave Facebook a valuation of $15 billion. It wasn't a pure investment: an ad deal was part of it.
If you want an upvote, you'll have to show your work... ;)
> He was wearing a necklace with a diamond-encrusted "PG" pendant. At that moment, I knew he was merely human.

Because he has a sense of irony?
> I get an sense that a YC rejection is quite a bit different than the average rejection (not getting into Google, not getting into Harvard, not getting into the finals of a competition, not getting a date, etc.). The fact is, getting into YC really _is_ a big deal and really is life changing.

Take that, Harvard! ;-)
Nobody argues the infrastructure part, he's saying that Google's Engine simply does not make much sense. Thing is, for 99.9% of all web applications do not have such crazy scalability requirements and open virtualized environments like EngineYard, Joyent, EC2, etc simply make more sense - they're open, they also take care of administration and hardware for you, but you're not supergluing yourself to Google's proprietary "WebOS".
Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners' Ire?
HaXe compiles to PHP
haXe is a ECMAScript-like language and compiler that targets multiple runtime platforms: Flash, Javascript, NekoVM, and now PHP (in alpha form).

As a user, I'm biased, but this compiler really extends the meaning of "Write once, run anywhere." haXe code running on Java, Python, Ruby, etc. is not out of the question, if anyone steps up to add those targets.
Is there merit to what he's saying? What exactly is the value that you'll be providing over the extant competitors? If you've chosen a poor market, why not find a new one?

If on the other hand his criticism is not really constructive, he's not suggesting anything new, and his spark is gone, then the situation is untenable. My experience has been that tolerating "co-founders," "partners," or "early employees" who lack passion for the product just doesn't end well. Get rid of him.
why? it works
Listen to what he is saying and come up with a convincing argument for why your project is different. After all, users and investors will ask the same thing. If you can't then perhaps he is right.
actually, exodus from yahoo might be good for ms+yahoo (no severance etc.) and for google too (good talent) and ofcourse as you mention, nice startup environ.
I agree that MySpace is a great tool for bands. I am in a band and actively use MySpace. This article is in no way trying to knock MySpace (I hope it was not perceived that way). I am just stating some facts that I thought some people would find surprising.
A minor nit-pick: only one d in 'adds', in the phrase 'video adds'.
I've mentioned this in the past, but it's worth mentioning again: YC are not school snobs.

The schools I attended aren't worth mentioning, and I couldn't remember what school my co-founder attended when I filled out the application (and it was within a couple of hours of the deadline, so I didn't wait to find out--it turns out to be among the best in Australia, but YC didn't know that when we were accepted, or even now, for that matter). So, while I get the feeling graduating from a good school is one currency with which you can show you're capable of doing something hard and completing it, I believe the YC folks are very amenable to accepting many other forms of payment.

There are certainly plenty of Stanford and MIT grads that make it in...but it's definitely not a requirement. (Seriously, I attended community colleges, and for crazy crap like audio recording and Jazz performance. You can't get much less impressive than my post-high school educational record.)
if you take any money you have a obligation to profit; even if its a grant, the return has to be there even if its just "public good with public money" -

- If you haven't taken money; follow your gut (and bills)
man ascii ;)
Anybody adding comments on Hacker News is just fine by me. Fracture away.
Sooner or later Valleywag will write something particularly informative or amusing

Sooner or later the noise will include a signal? That's an argument for banning them.
Well, there's this bias people have to say whatever choice they made was the best one, so the founder's opinions is not necessarily enough.
Hidden Tetris Game in Utorrent
One big problem with the make-money-first theory, is that it never really feels like you've made enough to stop.

(I've never been a millionaire, but I've noticed that I get more anxious about losing money when I have more of it to lose.)
Please elaborate on "zero computer knowledge." Is this someone from the past who doesn't even know about electricity, or just a typical person today who knows computers, but has no knowledge of the "magic" under the hood?

I'll assume the second.

Explain that the internet is just a collection of computers that are connected to each other. Some computers are always on and hold websites (servers) so that other computers (say, typical PCs) can connect to them to see the websites.

Now there are some computers that have the job of acting as the phone book so that the other computers know where to find the servers.

I like this exercise. It forces yourself to explain a system in the most simple terms possible.
Visualizing Viruses
"Often, companies don’t believe in using a product unless they have to pay for it, usually a lot."
Still haven't shown your work... did you remember to assign the numerical values of the string "YC" to the integer variable YC?

And did you remember to test against 0x5943, rather than 5943?

And did you take Endianness into account? ;-)
I think about those kind of things a lot. It's strange how we make ourselves (we the society) do things we hate, for pretty much our whole life. I can't stop thinking about someday, way in the future, someone looks back to the year 2000's history and find a song like that. They might think: "people were so dumb back then, why would someone work with stuff they hate?" Well, hopefully they'll think that. It'll be very sad if years from now people still relate to that song.

I think any person who have been working with IT have seen more than a handful code monkeys. I think that shows that there's a huge amount of unhappy workers in the field. I'm not sure that's exclusive of IT. That's probably has much more to do with the society itself. We are so amused with the new things we're able to do that we forget about having fun. People nowadays have like 15 days, maybe a month off work. That's very little. Life should be more about vacation than about work. I think we don't have our priorities set up straight. What do you guys think?
"open AIM" isn't really open, I think this was discussed in a past yc post; there are a lot of terms and conditions that are more overbearing than facebook's or google's terms/conditions
- like if you have x number of users, you must feature AOL ads on your app (or something like that)

Until Google Contacts API came out, I don't remember any major company giving third parties access to their users and their contacts officially. (ok Plaxo did but they had a condition that you couldn't make anything for profit) typically apps like Trillian got access when users gave them access to their own login information which is far from ideal and still not open by choice - more like 'broken into'

"I meant the phone system. Individual cell phones are not necessarily platforms."

the problem is, the social graph (contact info and call history) is contained and accessible from individual cell phones and not the phone system (unless again you trust some company to your login information for your cell phone web site account - still not open and a more dangerous than giving someone access your AIM login).

individual cell phones may not be platforms themselves, but the OS's they run on are...
I'm surprised Valleywag hasn't made a post about their banning. Perhaps they are still too busy complaining about how they were kicked out of the PopSugar-Techcrunch party.
this is awesome! Now, could you do the hand tracking a' la minority report as well? Seems like it.
I kind of like that certain people won't ever 'get' it. (I was one of them for along time, much like the blogger here :-) )
I am not that into bloging - but I have got to say that I am really tempted now that you have made it so easy for me to get quality traffic and rake in those AdSense dollars
What good is the best collection of links if it is not easily searchable? Is there a reason you're avoiding this functionality?
"Remember opposite day?"

No. But I see, now. I think.
I'd say "Mr. Senator, congratulations on getting seated as chairman of the science, technology, and transportation committee. Before you start making laws, maybe I should teach you a couple things..." and then after an agonizing few minutes, I'd say "Forget all that...you know how the pipes in your toilet work..."
Umm...I guess? But now I'm doubting my own humanity, or yours, because one of us clearly lacks humor.
Did the calculation account for the fact that there are only about 6 minutes of ádvertising every hour? (Off by a factor of 10)

The calculations then would more accurately be:

$0.750M/30sec * 60sec/min * 6 min/hr = $9M/hr

At 30M viewers, that is around $0.30/hr per viewer.

If we put that together we get:

$.30/hr * 33hr/year ~ $10/year per user.

And then with $30M users, we get our answer: $300M/year.
Agreed on all accounts. I think most facebook users think of it as essential enough to pay something as high as $2-10 per month to use it or some set of premium services. That's a good $100M at least monthly. Of course, making the transition from a 100% free site to a very cheap one is a bit tricky, but learning how to do that is a lesson that the industry as a whole can use and will probably have to do at some point.

The product acquires value to users as they use it. Giving it away for free at the beginning and as long as possible while it is manageable to do so is fine and advisable. However, in the long run there is nothing wrong or overly difficult in charging your users a little bit. 37signals is a good example of something similar to this.
I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and see nothing but "valleywag reports on techcrunchs comments on hacker news banning valleywag for too many stories on techcrunchs reporting hacker news considering banning valleywag."

Can't you see this is rapidly becoming one of those death spirals from which we could rapidly collapse into digg like mediocrity. In fact, the feedback from this might be enough to destroy the internet. Our only hope is to ban ban stories about banning valleywag recursively out to some bizarre order of infinity that only cantor understands.
If enough people like a Valleywag article (vote it up) there is not reason it should not be displayed. If you don't like it simply don't vote.

Paul,
In your article on Bayesian spam filters (I didn't read the essay since before joining YC aka several years) You mentioned rules based systems only work up to a point. Today it's Valleywag (I don't care about the site one way or the other) tomorrow your getting requests to ban half a dozen sites per day.
I think that instead of banning a specific site a better solution is to make the algorithm better.
Be careful with this approach. If you're really lucky, one day you'll wake up and find yourself playing in an irrelevant rock band.

http://www.grownmen.com/interior.asp?section=who

If you're not so lucky, your lack of passion for the "profit" path will lead to no money AND no time for creative pursuits in your life.

When you're young and single is the one time in your life when you have nothing stopping you from following whatever path you really want to follow...if you opt, instead, to follow the safest path, you're squandering that unique opportunity.

I'm old enough to know of what I speak here, and young enough to recall very clearly my thought processes that led me to miss several really nice opportunities when I was in my twenties. (I didn't always take the safe path, by any means, but I did it enough to have a few very real regrets.)
Here's Matt Cutts explaining it a little more: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/solved-another-common-site-rev...
It sounds like he knows what he's talking about. If you can't inspire him that your idea is good, you aren't going to inspire customers or investors. Listen to his arguments and fight it out.
8 Reasons Why GrandCentral.com is a Must-Have Tool
The article notes that dealing with _capabilities_ can become "arcane and confusing". This means that Caja may have a larger role at the big companies, such as Google and Yahoo, or people wanting to play ball with OpenSocial. The complexity will outweigh the benefits for most scripters, and the standard will not be implemented in any major browser.
If you have a demo or a UI prototype, even just a click-through, someone (other than the designer) should be running tests with users.

If you're planning on outside funding, someone should be working on that well before you need it. (You start raising round N before you close round N-1.)
browsershots.org is GPLd and does cross browser testing. Uses Python.
Absolutely. That's the plan.
Microsoft is, in it's current state, far from "doomed". The lock-in effect mentioned will account for their survival for some time, look at businesses still using windows 2000 in large deployment. The other thing to consider is how they have been trying to refocus their direction and corporate girth to target the web, i.e. online advertising, Silverlight and such. how successful that will be remains to be seen.