skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like it or not the airlines have provided what the majority of customers want, low price. If most people wanted a great flying experience and were willing to pay more for it that is what you have seen. The way the industry exists today is just what the market dictated. If people care more about the experience of buying parts than the cost then you will see sites that factor in experience. Since the market seems to dictate that low cost is most important we see octopart being successful. Economics, plain and simple.
Parser Combinators in Scala
uhh....how about http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=<username>; ?

This link is available in your user profile.
I think what some of the other comments here are missing is that this was supposed to be a "wouldn't it be cool if we could actually do this" project as opposed to a "let's create a viable video player" project. Isn't that part of what hacking is about?
I will suggest that you read the article again and revise your judgement. This is why.

I founded a search engine (web, images, video and business search) now in Alpha, with limited resources as well; trust me I know how hard it is.

Simple questions, how good is your crawler? (You shouldn’t implement a scheme for each web site, though I understand for your business it kinda make sense)

How much information do you have in your repository? (You should consider data in TB if not you are still far from any trouble)
Ferret is a great indexing tool but how much data can it index? How scalable is it?
Looking at the tech behind Ferret, how much resource does it use?
How good is your relevancy model? (This question is tightly link to your indexing)

I loved your idea,
Just one thing: work on the relevancy again; I searched for ‘ruby on rails’ and got ‘ruby’ only related results first the <relevant ones> after. Also I will suggest you cache images to enhance user experience. Please don’t take my review personal.
I actually did this in 1997 IIRC. I tried using an animated GIF but it was too dithered and grainy, so I switched to JS and showing JPEG frames with a timeout so I could get 24-bit color instead of 8-bit.
I tend to agree. It was worth having a go at buying the company, but now they've been rebuffed their next best option is simply to clone the interesting bits in house.

It'll take them six months to produce a reasonable facsimile , but then they probably don't have another feature release planned for that amount of time anyway.

Personally, I think the Xobni guys are fools for refusing the offer. If Microsoft are interested in acquiring the technology, then they're almost certainly going to become a competitor now the offer is refused. They could do far worse than selling out for 20 odd million in cash and stock, spending a couple of years working for Microsoft while their stock vests and then going on to the next big thing. Instead they've got themselves an uphill battle in which they are running very barely ahead of a corporate juggernaut.

Well whatever happens, it should be entertaining.
Security-Personality: Profiling the Passive Aggressive Mind
I don't know about that. I would happily install flash once and be able to freely use something awesome like omnisio.

I would say that over-use of flash sucks and "click to skip preview" stuff is annoying.
Snookered by patent squatters:: Use Many Faces, Many Places?
Slide Losing Facebook Slideshow Battle To Newcomer Animoto
Good point.

So I won't try to market my line of small business software.

Instead, I'll just promote the fact that it's so sophisticated, it could only be written in a brand new language that I had to create myself: eJavaLisPython++.
David's point was well-made, but this post makes a good point as well. 37signals has huge structural advantages because of the popularity of Rails and their blog's huge audience. When you can push out your announcements to over 80,000 feed readers alone, you have an advantage few others can match.

The bottom line is that getting distribution is hard. Those who have it often forget that.
>> How many people here on HN will dare to criticize a YC startup?

You said it. Doing so is grounds for ruthless downmodding on here.

PG said there are 30 editors now. People are getting accounts marked dead at the drop of a hat, if they don't drink the kool-aid.
Google WHOIS OneBox
What she needed was a couple more hackers. Who needs MBAs?
Drawloop Technologies integrates with Scribd's iPaper
I'm of the mind that Google should build a social network around "Googling" someone. If they can capture that behavior, their install base would be huge.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the fact that men readily date women who are significantly younger -- while the same is not particularly common in women. Men have a much larger pool of candidates as they get older (while women had a larger one when they were younger)
Direct sale is an excellent model but I don't think it's a requirement. To me it underscores the main principle which is about reducing dependencies. Why convince two parties to do something (someone to visit your site, and an advertiser to run an ad targeting that visitor) when you can convince one.

I'd also add that the single most important thing I've found in creating a business like this is keeping your costs low. The same two businesses, with the same income and customers will have very different times during a downturn depending on their committed monthly burn rate. I know it sounds obvious, but its amazing to me how many businesses handicap themselves from day one with large spending commitments.
You should get in touch with BJ Fogg at Stanford. He taught a class recently that was similar.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_stanford_learned_b...
Was the footnote notation REALLY necessary?
doesn't work on mac. :(
I'm not sure what case the author is trying to make against RDBMSes, but SimpleDB doesn't seem like much of an answer. Shifting the burden of sorting and searching on to the programmer seems like a big step backwards to me.

Besides, what's so nasty about SQL?
I think that if you really look at the startup landscape you'll see that there are a bunch of companies trying to charge people (mine included, although we exist in a different domain than most of the startups I run into). The hardest part of that equation isn't the charging, it's getting the buzz out and getting people to even look at your app in the first place.

Just changing the founder mindset to "charge for something" isn't nearly enough.
There is a need for this. I was looking at some other solutions and gave up and went with Zoho Invoice when it launched about a month ago. Using Excel has worked over the years but I needed something that was a bit more reliable at keeping all the info neat and tidy. The main factor for me was price, I would probably not have signed up but the 5 buck a month fee was something that I could take without feeling guilty or lazy. Anything over 20 bucks a month and I would of kept doing things the same way as i only have about 8-12 re-occurring invoices every month.

Good Luck!
The London Scene: Songkick mix British propriety and Silicon Valley style
They turned down the offer? I totally missed that. Where'd you see that?
5 Ways To Increase Creativity
It seems to me the issues of drunk driving and drinking age are orthogonal. There were just as many kids driving drunk (under 21) when I was in HS as there were driving drunk (over 21) when I was in college. Age had nothing to do with it, and legal access to alcohol didn't either.

MADD's argument is fallacious, but it's the same line of reasoning that those advocating banning of firearms take. Somehow making guns illegal will cut down on gun-related-deaths. Nevermind that the people that tend to shoot other people don't really care if they have to get a gun illegally, just like kids that drink underage don't really care that they are getting alcohol illegally. In a perfect world, you could just remove all guns at once and perfectly enforce the alcohol age limit every time (and there would be no black market), but that isn't reality.

If MADD was really interested in cutting down on drunk driving, they'd campaign for stiffer penalties and education. And, like someone else here pointed out, they'd campaign for public transportation. When the car is the only option to get home, your choices are either "don't drink" or "drive drunk."
and for a period of time, there were commercial web servers

That period of time includes the present.

companies made a lot of money selling Unixes

They still do, with Apple being the most obvious.
SimpleDB shifts the burden of database scaling and maintenance from the programmer. Being free from those worries is a hugely important consideration. Even if it means having to forgo the ability to do joins or order by.

And you can still use SQL (albeit restricted) on SimpleDB with some of the new wrapper libraries such as this one: http://code.google.com/p/simplejpa/
You're imperfect the way you and your bloodline naturally evolved! God... PSHHH
Tell me right now that the talk establishes that GitHub and Lighthouse are financially successful (cash flow positive after investment) and I will:

* Apologize

* Watch the video

I don't think I'm going to have to do either.

The point I'm trying to make is, just because geeks love something (like, inexplicably, GitHub) doesn't mean it's necessarily a financial success. Also: hundreds of end-users? A tiny customer base.
Good use of integrated results. it takes you to a horrible looking site though with cheap generic seo information
Oh I remember the mental disconnect I had when he said that, I'm just saying that I assume he misspoke and that slide was supposed to have a real meaning of some sort over time. It seems much more likely that he thought through the slide when he made it and just blundered when on the spot than the other way around.

I also had a moment of confusion on the slide that said 400 x $40 = $200k until I realized he was talking about 12 months and rounding. I imagine something similar was happening here.
Thank you for the link, it's extremely helpful. I'm still sifting through everything, but does this still allow for commercial usage of the feeds?
I agree with jdavid - books on gender-related issues can be helpful. [The Game] is hysterical. Read the ones for guys and girls. Some others:

[How to Succeed with Women] - Sounds cheesy, but goes over the basics that "geeks" often miss, including dressing appropriately, grooming, and polite conversation.

[He's Just Not That Into You] - Manual for women on how to tell if a guy doesn't care about them. Useful for learning about behaviors to avoid and their underlying reasons.

[Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back] - Can't recommend this one enough. Norah Vincent lived for a year as a man, and reports back on the challenges and successes she had. Invaluable for understanding both men and women.
The Anti-Portfolio of Investments Not Made
I think simpler is better. A single price makes it easier to decide whether to use the system at all. Of course, it shouldn't be too high, but I don't think $59 is too high.
Part of the cause, I suspect, is that the Rails Trac (http://dev.rubyonrails.org/) has a rather strict policy. Unlike, say, Firefox's or GNOME's Bugzilla, where a feature request with a halfhearted patch can stay open for years, the Rails folks will immediately close ("WONTFIX") any feature request that doesn't also contain a working patch, documentation updates, and unit tests.

The upshot of this is that I've contributed many patches to GNOME, but none to Rails. If I come up with something useful, I'll blog about it so others can see, and then let it go. The entry barrier to get it in Rails is just too high.

I suppose I could make it a plugin, but a lot of these things seem like they should really be in Rails itself, so trying to factor them out to be a usable plugin is just a different kind of pain.
So /that's/ what the edw519 t-shirt was all about.

I kept seeing you that day and wondering what in blazes edw519 was.
I had a good chuckle posting that. I've been a Catalyst user/fan for around 2 years now and appreciate your work on it. I saw that your slides on KitiWiki used Moose. Exciting that Catalyst will be using it itself. Now I have a fun excuse to play with Moose for real. Bread::Board looks interesting as well, I hadn't seen it at all.
Sure they can roll out new apps to a huge audience now, but they did not start with 80k readers. It took them years to transition from a consultancy to a SaaS model, and years to grow Basecamp and Rails. Getting distribution is not that hard, but it takes a LONG time (talking from experience).
Madd has been saying this for years, but it ignores the fact that in Canada, even though the drinking age didn't change, deaths related to alcohol decresed about the same amount (percentage wise).

Madd was started for a good cause, but right now it is just a right wing, prohibistic organization, hell bent on stoping drinking whatsover, and of course it's memembers have self interest to keep their campains (and their salaries) going on. Even their first founder doesn't want to do anything with them anymore.
Do you have evidence for that?
Introverted people need to break out of their shell and 'just do things'. This applies to pretty much everything. If you fail, try, try again and you will eventually succeed whether you want to be able to socialize with people or learn a new language or whatever it is that you truly desire.
The customer login support is a big deal for me. I've been trying to get away from paper billing for a while, because it's slow and expensive and I'd rather just send an email with a link. I've been doing that the hard way lately and had been thinking about building something like your system. I'm glad you did it instead.

At $59, it's on the far side of what I'd want to pay for such a system. However, I would pay it.

One thing I'd like to see is a way to build custom invoices. I have a very specific, and fairly unique, invoice design, and would like to hang on to that. Switching to a generic invoice layout might be a dealbreaker. I know that's a lot of work though -- sorry for adding on to the "please do this!" pile.
Harvest is time tracking app, with invoicing, that I really like (not unlike Blinksale). I think it's the only subscription software that my business pays for. AFAIK it was started by two designers, and my guess is that they're doing well, because they keep adding new features and raising their prices. :)
i will be supporting the custom invoice design as a one-time fee for turning your existing invoice design into code. i may also design some other basic templates that can be used instead of the default.

my company's invoices that are generated through corduroy have a neat faded background image and logo.
Shouldn't there be about as many highly eligible and appealing men as there are attractive, eligible women?

I read this sentence several times trying to undo the brain-fuck that it did to me. The internet is awash in balderdash, but when you come across a superbly brazen falsehood like this, your defenses tend to fall away.

Now--what and where are these allegedly existent, even numerous, women? The vast majority of women, at least 99 percent, have some combination of eating disorder [1], television-induced personality necrosis, age beyond or near-beyond the breeding years, "baggage" (children, alcoholism, etc), or straightforward ugliness.

[1] Not anorexia nervosa--the opposite.
It's actually a scaling issue - our server is seeing an order of magnitude more traffic than even our launch spike. We are working on a solution right now :)
Here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/20/microsoft-signs-letter-...
It is great that more ordinary customers are starting to use Ubuntu. It is a great platform and if people are smart enough, it (Linux) will become the top used platform system anywhere.
Why do features need to be in the core? Why can't you just make a gem or something available?

For Catalyst, we have the same policy. Send us some random patch with no tests or docs and there's no way it will ever see core. However, we are very successful at getting people to resubmit with docs and tests. But usually, the patch to core doesn't need to be a patch to core, it can be Some Other Module.
Shoot to Thrill: Weapon Realism
>I think that the problem is all these standardized tests where student performance is directly related to the teacher's and school's funding.

Teacher and school funding has little to do with it.

Student performance is directly related to parental income, which is (often) related to school funding. But parental income is the driving factor, not school funding.

As an example, take Hoboken NJ. The main people attending the public schools are kids from the housing projects at the back of the city. They rank in the bottom 18% of NJ:

http://hoboken411.com/archives/11398

School funding: $24,949 per student.

http://www.nj.com/hobokennow/index.ssf/2008/04/boe_challenge...
Application Design Decisions - A blog covering the decisions made in designing an app
I doubt many people on here need or use Xobni, it is strictly an Outlook plugin?

I didn't even use Outlook way back in the day when I was employed by a Fortune 500 that forced everyone to use it. I remember once someone mentioning to my manager that I hadn't completed my Outlook training and everyone in our group had a good laugh.

We aren't quite the target audience generally speaking.
People are getting accounts marked dead at the drop of a hat, if they don't drink the kool-aid.

That's false, as anyone can see by looking at the dead comments and submissions. There have always been people on here criticizing YC and YC-funded startups. And there have always been about 30 editors, for that matter.
<blockquote>I would guess it's because they want to maintain control. I don't think that necessarily makes them evil, however, because control can mean controlling the customer experience for the better.</blockquote>

Any claim that the desire to maintain control is only for entirely selfless reasons should always be met with the highest suspicion, as would any other claims that something superficially self-serving is actually done for selfless reasons.

Note that 'highest suspicion' != 'immediate condemnation'.

It is always possible that the superficially self-serving motivation is not what is truly driving a decision, but it's usually the way to bet (and you can be sure that it doesn't hurt), most especially at the emergent organizational/institutional level, rather than the personal.
VC confidence plummets - fewer liquidity events, but startups are "much leaner and scrappier"
Free Software v. Open Source
oth communities are overly defensive in which term to use to describe software that gives you the freedom to change and share it. If both communities could unite and both movements converge imagine how much more we could accomplish.
Learn to genuinely like people.
Is YC scoring all these PR hits? Or is it the individual startups?
That's good advice. I'll admit the scaling aspects of Ferret, and Rails at this point, scare me quite a bit. My goal right now is to continue to expand my index and learn what's working and what's not.

As was mentioned in another comment I'm looking into other, more long term, indexing solutions (possibly SOLR), so hopefully that will help in the relevancy area. I'm also working on an in-house ranking algo to better sort results.

I appreciate your feedback.
I would dare criticize YC startups (but not this one since I know absolutely nothing about it). If I got banned from here for doing so I would start a competitive site out of revenge...because that would be ridiculous.

Or have a lightsaber dual with pg, I would leave the choice to him. I warn you I would be wearing spandex during the latter though.
Looks like someone beat you to goodcompany.com -- a more clever name. :)
it's not that apple "doesn't do this." it's that apple had a recent "ground zero event," a term i just made up, which means they had a perfect opportunity to ditch all their old APIs and start anew when they switched operating systems, from macos "classic" to macosx. that was in 2001, which is pretty darned recent. most new mac apps are written to the cocoa api, which didn't even exist before macosx.

however, microsoft is slated to do the exact same thing with the next version of windows, which will supposedly break binary compatibility with old windows apps. if ms has the guts to follow through on this, it will be a Very Good Thing.
it was a rhetorical question, it didn't occur to me that it would pertain directly to who i was responding to

my point is not everyone wants to accomplish the same things in life, but everyone needs money to be able to accomplish them (at minimum to pay the bills)

why would someone want to just get some money and be done with all the company stuff? because they have something better to do. maybe they want to visit every city in the world. maybe they want to raise their children full time and homeschool them. having money, they have those options

if you don't have something better to do (in your definition of 'something better',) then you are already doing what you think is best, and more power levels to you. may your hair glow yellow or gold at some point
Just wanted to provide more details on what innonate said, I do bizdev for Angelsoft on the west coast and in the north east (Boston).

For 2 years now, my life has consisted of selling and training angel group managers and fund managers on how to use Angelsoft to manage their dealflow, screen deals, and do due diligence.

As for what babyshake said,yes, many investors operate as "loan wolves" and might not even identify themselves as "angels". To make our vision possible, the best approach to attract investors in mass was focusing on "angel networks" or "angel groups", where a group of investors would band together to spread risk and get better deal flow.

These groups are typically non profit, and don't have much infrastructure, so they were in dire need of a tool like Angelsoft, and very willing to work closely with us to come up with something for their needs.

The benefits of using Angelsoft for this groups range from having one central location for all of their data, to being able to syndicate deals across all the groups on the platform.

Now that almost all these groups are on Angelsoft and I'm starting to focus more on VCs, Jason has been working on ways to make this platform even more useful to entrepreneurs.

If you've got any further questions about Angels, don't hesitate to ask!
Why make them create 3 apps? You want 30 super-extra-cool poke apps?

Why not make them make 1 app that actually does something? That means, no pokes, gifts, quizzes, walls, etc.

Haven't you noticed that people HATE these apps? And that there are literally tens of thousands of them? That's about all you're going to be able to create in 1/3 of a semester, as a 1 day a week class, having no facebook experience.

Also, the api is not so difficult that they need to make a throw away app. You can figure it out as you go along. It could all be covered in 80 minutes of lecture.

Is it worth inviting VCs? No. If they make ridiculously useful apps, they'll get attention without a VC circle jerk.

"virality, monetization, and scaling"
How about you teach scaling, but only when someone actually needs it. Monetization, I'd hope, is taught in a business course, and virality could be covered with about a 10 minute powerpoint. Instead, I'd talk to them about how to leverage the data and social connections of their users, and how to use that to solve practical, every day problems.
Yes they were foolish to turn down the offer, but competing against a culture as meeting-centric and slow as Microsoft's is less challenging than you might think, IMO.

(I can't believe they turned down the offer!)
Great event. Worth the plane ticket and hotel. Mix it up next year with a different slate of speakers and topics, and I'll be back.