skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Valid point, it did have that feel.

But I think the key points are suited to all interactions. If you are first meeting someone...and I don't know how to phrase this to be politically correct...you are 'intimately' interested in, perhaps telling them about your magic card collection isn't the best approach. You could discuss his/her Starcraft skills instead :)
I think most programmers would find sorting and searching to be easier than scaling a standard relational database over multiple machines.
long live the YC PR machine.

having said that, there is real substance behind songkick. pete and ian are plenty talented.
One Laptop Per Child to transition entirely to Windows XP
Xobni, Microsoft, and why Americans love haterade
I think success is easy to measure - the number of users for that app.

Regardless of how they do it, what it is, that is the 'success' of a facebook app.

I wouldn't put any rules like no poke apps, if they can create a super-duper-cool-elite-poke app that still takes off now, they are doing something right on the marketing/viral side.
I think you may have misunderstood my emphasis (my fault). I'm not interested in the grammatical mistakes as such; I'm interested in what happens when I go to read a web page from a source I'm unfamiliar with. Because URLs are pointers, I jump directly to content in medias res with very little context. In the absence of context, other indicators fill the vacuum. In this case, the sloppiness of the writing affected my perception of the author - which may be unfair. I'd have to read more to know for sure. But that's my point: fair or unfair, I'm not inclined to. (The photo didn't help, either.)

It's interesting that you brought up not being a native speaker. That is a piece of context I instinctively scan for, because if I get it wrong my judgment will be off. In this case, the title ("a UK VC") and the fellow's name made me expect the Queen's English and, now that I think of it, probably raised the standard I unconsciously applied.

One can make errors about this. I knew an American who had mastered Russian to such an extent that Russians thought he was Russian. This backfired. Inevitably, he would put things in a way that a real Russian never would. Not realizing he was a brilliant student of their language, native speakers concluded that he was an illiterate Russian. That's something Russians care about a lot, so he got badly treated.

As for your comments, I don't ignore them; I'm familiar enough with your user name that I must have read many of them, though I don't remember anything specific. I bet that if I had been asked, I would have identified you as an intelligent non-native-English speaker, and if I noticed any spelling mistakes I doubt they mattered.
I think it comes with age and experience.

When I was right off school, I had the same problems as you guys, mainly overthinking about everything, and everybody you meet, makes it hard to just have casual conversations.

Just as I learned in soccer, you should just stop overthinking and overanalyzing, and just go with it, causually and naturally.

Also, in my current job, I interact with a lot more people everyday, so I was forced out of my shell a while ago.

But, when you are in parties, you have to make some effort to reach to people and talk to them. Even thou nothing might come out of it, it is better than just staying in one corner and doing nothing.

Anyway, stop reading books and just put yourself out there and practice.

It will help when you meet girls.
Google retains title as world's most powerful brand
OpenID Usability: Two Solutions That Could Take OpenID Mainstream
IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D
Also note that courts have generally held that pricing information is not protectable by copyright (prior to publication it might be a trade secret, but once you publish it, it essentially becomes a fact in the public domain). This has not stopped large retailers from using novel legal theories (or carefully timed DMCA takedown requests) to stop or chill 'Black Friday' websites, of course, but the law is actually reasonably clear in this area.
people seem to miss this aspect of grabbing success. 37signals took 5 years to get here. wikipedia/wiki/crowdsourcing took 8 years. craigslist took more than 13 years.

success is a balanced equation, you need equal parts marketing, sales, engineering, product design, pricing, timing, and even a bit of luck to get to what you want.
Microsoft Office 2007 fails OOXML conformance tests with 122,000 errors
Microsoft not doing something that could make them money and is in all likelihood perfectly legal (not that that has stopped them in the past) just to "not be called assholes"? Really?
Go to bars and pull up seats next to random people. Make a game out of it. See how long you can hold a conversation until it gets awkward.
or maybe those girls are trying to score a future millionare... hehe...

ok, just kidding. But in some "Tech parties" you always seem some of them and it is very easy to spot the Gold Digging types.
80-90% the individual startups (including in this case).

One reason there seem to be so many YC-funded startups in
the news is that there are just so many of them. Maybe also that the YC brand is starting to be known by reporters.
not forgetting (drum-roll) Michelle, Dr. Philip, Wynne, Lee & latest recruit Mr Dan Lucraft ;-)
Songkick rocks period.
Simpler is better, but not for pricing.
Look into variable pricing theory and price discrimination, it offers higher potential profits. If you do stick to fixed pricing, make sure you do at least a minimal amount of research to determine the optimal price. YOU don't think 59$ is too high, but whats the optimal price for profitability?
There are a lot of factors to weight when considering a sale. It's not as simple as weighing the (rumored and potentially inaccurate) purchase price.

You can't say it was foolish unless you know everything--payment schedule (cash/stock/milestones), ambition of founders, post-acquisition employment requirements, future direction of the product.
There have been noises from Microsoft going right up to Gates to the effect that they themselves are abandoning Vista. This would make the life of this product pretty short if it only targets Vista's flaws.

Also, only people forced to use Vista are using it at this point which boils down to employees of corporations with not-so-wise IT departments - not the prime audience for a startup product IMO.

I do think there is potential for money in the idea of building a layer on top of Windows that makes it more usable. Xobni seems to be doing exactly that starting with email. (I'm sure they are looking beyond email by this point).
I can just feel the angst and envy in this thread. Despite being a silly product, they still worked very hard on it and built up enough spin and hype to get it to that point. It brings up the argument that a startup can do any kind of shenanigans as their business, but with hard work, resourcefulness, determination, and perseverance, they can still be successful. Go read their blog from years ago when it was just a couple of guys driving out to the valley, all the way up till now with seven digit offers coming in.

Xobni will make off like bandits despite how "worthless" the product is. The next offer will be for way more than the original $20 million. I wish them the best of luck.
This will become useful to me (more to my wife, actually) once they add Russia to the list of countries considered as the world.

That said, we pay ~$10-15 per month for intl. calls through skype currently, so the savings aren't that big.
"edw519" is the source code for a Lisp interpreter written in eJavaLisPython++ ... it's a terse language.
Who are all these successful companies developing this great software in India?
I've read all the same blog posts as everybody else, read all the end-of-the-world-is-nigh newspaper columns telling us how the high tech, software-development jobs are being outsourced to India. So my question is, where are all these great products designed by Indian developers? Honest to God, I want to know. Why is Y-Combinator not relocating to Bangalore? Why is this news site and the JOS boards not populated by hot shot Indian developers?<p>I would really, honest-to-God, love to see someone start naming names, and naming products. Where is all this great Indian software? Is it real? Are these guys just shy? Or is it all a media fantasy, like so much of the online world these days?
The Art of Discovering: An Interview with Scott Berkun
It doesn't really matter much to me if you watch the video or not. I did want to take the opportunity, however, to give you a taste of your own medicine after this incident: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135296. ;)

All that aside, the whole point of the talk was that one can live very well off one's web application even if it's only moderately successful. I think the example he gave was 2,000 small business users at $40/month ~= $1,000,000/year in gross revenue. Or 400 users at the same rate if you don't mind only grossing $200,000 a year.

His argument was that you don't need to stress about investors, 12-hour days, and viral loops as long as you're willing to "settle" for a pleasant, financially viable, and capital efficient business with a niche of users who really appreciate your approach to solving their problems. That's the irony of making fun of an app in this thread for only having several hundred users.

You probably would enjoy the video; I certainly did.

(Incidentally, GitHub and Lighthouse didn't require massive capital investments [1] and I'm pretty sure that they're hosted "for free" on Engine Yard. Having a few hundred users would practically guarantee that they're cashflow positive.)

[1] http://www.akitaonrails.com/2008/4/21/chatting-with-chris-wa...
The solution isn't yc then it's your browser.
Zoho.com has been quite impressive in executing on a strong vision and taking on Silicon Valley directly.
Ask YC: How do you want your advertising?
As a planner in the interactive ad business, I'm curious what is the desired relationships between advertisers and hackers (and other start-up types). Do you care what brands are on your sites? Do you want collaboration, or just a check? Partnerships or straight-banners?

There is plenty of noise regarding Web 2.0 in Adland, but much of it is presumptuous and ill-informed. I'm curious to hear a hacker perspective regarding what is wanted from advertising (besides money, naturally.)
It's purpose was purely functional: to make it easier to "meet" the people I've already "met" here. It worked like a charm. Well almost like a charm. I didn't meet you. Perhaps next time.
What would be disruptive is an iPhone-like device with unlimited 3G-speed-or-better data loaded up with skype, a jabber/irc client, and the iphone's other goodies.

Why are we still paying per-text-message and why do we still have monthly minute limits? It's all data anyway.

The disruptive moment is when wireless net connections become as flat-rate/fast/boring as wired net connections.
Thanks to you, Xichekolas, we can now say "open source code".
I like how you automatically assign a guest ID so visitors can try out the customization features right away, and think, "Hell, I'm halfway to joining -- might as well go the rest of the way now." The same thing could have been done invisibly with a cookie, but then the psychological hook wouldn't be there.

That's a very clever detail.
The Sugar interface is the best part of the OLPC. I would never use mine if it ran XP, for a computer that underpowered putting Windows glut on it is a huge mistake.
I'll second that. Further, just because a package is available as a plugin, that does not mean it is suitable and is of sufficient quality for a production application.
One subject you could explore is how the metrics given by Facebook affects the perception of a "successful" app. The primary metric for applications is daily active users, while Facebook itself defines an "active" user as someone who logs in at least once a month - I always thought that distinction is interesting. The secondary metric are total installs. Things like repeat users, page views, pages/visit aren't as used. This has the strange effect that large quiz apps - which tend to rise and fall in a matter of about a month - are usually seen as more "successful" than applications with a steady returning user base.
Measuring success that way is really just turning the class into a seminar on viral marketing in facebook. If the class were for credit and one were the competitive sort, it would be "easy" enough to send out spam mails and to advertise the app as doing something amazing that it doesn't really do.

Rather than look for "success" metrics, I think the students might appreciate a qualitative assessment of their efforts from bkrausz.
Who are the 20 Most Valuable Companies Over the Years? [pictocharts!]
I will soon release a new module for eJavaLisPython++. Its source code will probably be, "jjl43", but I'm running some unit tests to see if I can get measurably better performance out of "jjm4".
Honestly, I don't think this is the type of course people should be taking in college. At most it should be a component of a web technologies class.
Great talk!

Beware, for me the first video on the page stopped way before the end for no apparent reason, besides I hated the interface. I'd recommend the Justin.TV version below.
"but competing against a culture as meeting-centric and slow as Microsoft's is less challenging than you might think"

I think I'll get another opinion about that from someone at Netscape, Lotus, or Corel.

Oh, never mind.
Hints of iGoogle Turning Into Its Own Social Network
Safari debugging improvements on the horizon
"Dismissing comments because of spelling errors?"

On a post to a forum like this, of course not.

But not even running your own blog post through a spell or grammar checker?

Unakseptibal!
Facebook Publishes “Insider’s Guide To Viral Marketing”
No, I don't like the karma system. It has too much potential to discourage dissent. I like the upvote/downvote system for comments and stories, but keeping track of karma turns it into a punishment/reward system.
"In bioinformatics, you are stuck with ancient Perl/CGI scripts or some VB/Java time bomb."

Out of curiosity, why is that?
I'm unsure how this is different than any other business, whether online or brick-and-mortar.

He says right in the presentation: this is not guaranteed to work. You still have an uphill battle; the general wisdom is that three out of every four businesses started in the US fail within their first year.

However... your odds of creating a profitable company based on a sound business model are far better than the odds of you building a startup with an insane burn rate and surviving long enough (and creating a service useful enough) to have a liquidity event.
OOXML is truly an awful format. I've been neck deep in the 6000 page spec for the last couple months implementing it for our product.

There's fun things like trying to remember what nvPicPr, spPr, cNvPicPr, cNvPr, nvPr, cNvSpPr each mean, and quirks like different uses of the same tag being in different namespaces for no apparent reason (http://openxmldeveloper.org/forums/thread/2931.aspx)

The sad/scary thing is, even if ISO manages to beat OOXML into a half decent format, Office 2007 already implements this pseudo-OOXML format, which will become the de facto standard. If you want to work with the millions of copies of Office 2007 and the billions of fake-OOXML documents already out there, you'll have to develop specifically for it, not the ISO approved spec. Yet Microsoft will claim they're the same.

It will be like IE all over again. It's a huge mess.
I don’t want to sound negative here. I personally don’t think Facebook itself has any cool feature or technical challenging stuff for college student. I was a grad student 15 years ago, I don’t think then it would have been a kick for me.

I guess anything around the concept of Facebook and how it impact users experience or usability stats; in short anything related to the frenzy around Facebook will be much useful and educative to student.

To the question how much can you achieve with Facebook API? Very little technically
We're only talking about ditching karma, the running total for each user. We would still be able to upvote/downvote stories and comments, but those votes would only effect the individual story or comment, not the user who posted it.
Smartphones out of stock across the board |  Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
Mac Clone Maker Psystar Starts Shipping Computers
I voted you up, because I am sure you were joking. Half-joking, anyway - the downmodding part is probably true, but the editors kicking you is not.
I dare not criticize you in spandex (because I know absolutely nothing about you), but still, I vote for Option a.
But at least there's some central place to submit a patch to. If you improve the module, then everyone can easily benefit simply by upgrading the module.
Is one superior to the other, should I spring for both, is Google analytics superior? If you used one or both in the past and have an opinion I would love to hear it.
I'd broaden the scope of the class to tackle the more general topic of scalable viral applications and how to develop, integrate, and monetize them.

1. Development. Introduce microframeworks designed for rapid development of small footprint apps. Tackle initial product design issues with viral applications.

2. Integration. Show the students how to (1) integrate their apps with Facebook and other services and (2) bridge their small apps to larger legacy apps and other web-based services.

3. Monetization. Here you can cover metrics, user feedback, virality, etc, etc.
Ask YC: Grooveshark Lite, What Do You Think?
Sorry if my reply came across a bit rough. Naturally, not being a native speaker, I felt a bit irked by it, because I would tend to fall victim to the "spelling mistakes filter" myself.

Of course judging by the presentation in general is perfectly valid and natural. Otherwise there would be no web design.
Facebook Insider's Guide to Viral Marketing
I had the same reaction to his picture too, FWIW. I figure the guy's got more than one picture he can use to represent him, and presumably he picked the one that he thought represented him the best ...
The mistakes he made would not be caught by spell checkers, I think. What good grammar checkers are there? It seems Firefox comes with some spell checking functionality (at least it corrects me when posting on the net), but I have no idea how good it is. I think not that good...
It comes down to some women, are so fricking picky. I mean, way to pickier than guys, and unrealsticly so.

One thing the article failed to mention; is that women in their late 20's and early 30s are already past their prime years of reproduction, and usually getting less attractive (example, most miss universe are under 25). So they are becoming less desirable then their mid 20s counterparts, hence it is natural, in a perfect market, that they will have to settle of something less they could get when they were 24-27 (what can be considered prime years for women).
I don't think Gimein meant that too seriously. I assumed he was talking from the point of view of women who complain about the lack of eligible men.
not to mention that a sub $20M sale on $4.2M investment would not be seen favorably at all by the investors sitting on the board.
Gee, thanks. :-)

Have you thought about their responsibility for the tremendous amount of time and energy that people lose because they've had to use MS software? For example, how many billions of dollars of time are lost/wasted because MS puts out such buggy software that's used by so many people but MS literally doesn't care to actually fix anything unless it will help them make more sales?
The next offer will be for way more than the original $20 million.

You could be right. But when I saw that "20 million" I could hardly believe it. If I was a MSFT exec, I'd simply say, "we'll give you 1.5 million (or whatever), take it or leave it." If they left it, I'd have a couple interns replicate the thing.
"Moral of the story: just do it. It will probably feel weird but you are the only person who will notice."

While this advice is, of course, true, it's also pretty common for introverts without a lot of social experience to not notice when they're making someone uncomfortable. So, starting conversations is a great way to get over the fear of them, ending them in a reasonable time frame is a great way to insure you aren't crossing the boundary into uncomfortable (for the other person...I know that the introvert is going to be uncomfortable throughout the exchange, as I'm an introvert myself, and so the cues that may be obvious to most folks aren't as obvious to an introvert...insert boiling frog analogy here).
I have not used Xobni myself, but I think if I have implemented a plug in for Outlook, offered $20M by Microsoft for it, I will take the money and run as fast as I can.
Outlook is a Microsoft product, they have unlimited resources, they understand Outlook itself better than anyone outside. Hey this guys can replicate the plug in really fast time trust me.
I’m a consultant and done stuff for them I know some of the people there; a bunch of really smarts hackers.
Want to change your lifestyle? You need to force it, it is difficult and you need to get out of your comfort zone and put yourself in awkward situations. Here is a great book with a 30 day lifestyle challenge. Each day is a new challenge. By day 30 you will be comfortable walking up to and engaging any stranger in interesting conversations. Day one challenge for instance is start five conversations with 5 strangers. Each day there is a new challenge and they get progressively harder and funny enough easier as you become more comfortable outside your comfort zone.
http://www.amazon.com/Rules-Game-Neil-Strauss/dp/0061540455/...
Unknown or expired link.
This happens often to me when trying to reply. Recently more often, and it is a little bit annoying. PG, is there any way to do automatic resolving without having to refresh the page and risk losing your comment text?
scary cool. is it legal?
I agree with this. My biggest fear up to last year was public speaking. No matter what format it was, I just hated being in front of people. Then one day, I decided I wasn't going to suck at it anymore and I started to seek out opportunities to present, and I slowly got better. It is still pretty terrifying, but usually I'm the only one who notices.
The exit is the hardest part - by far.
For anyone who couldn't figure out what the earlier replies r.e. judging people had to do with anything, the parent reply is an illustration.
Yes I know. The whole point is that I believe this buried feature of HN should be a top level navigation.

If I'm alone in this it's cool, I'll just add a bookmark in my browser.
The boilerplate goes like this:

Lots of labels have distribution deals with GS, and more are signing on everyday. They have an escrow system set up so that as the deals are signed, the labels can collect any money that has accrued.
Start Pages: The Next Social Networks
what's the difference between docstoc and scribd?
ID Selector - Making OpenID easier
And, of course, they were wrong (and had they actually talked to some of the girls, they would have known that). I met one young woman who is a CompSci major and has built and sold a Facebook app. I'd give good odds that she'll out-hack and out-earn those two fellows by an order of magnitude in her lifetime. It's a small sample size, and I didn't meet any other women that I didn't previously know from YC, but 100% of the women (er, woman) I met at Startup School were hackers.
summary: its a known issue, its been around forever with lots of threads on it, and odds are it won't be going away anytime soon.
Thoughts on startup school
EC2 on Rails
Microsoft of the 80s and mid-90s is not the Microsoft of today, is it?

You don't think there's any particular systemtic reason why Apple shipped like 5 releases of OS X in the time it took to create Vista?