skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sequoia as a firm is significantly bolder than the others. They really don't care what other VCs think. I also like David Hornik and Fred Wilson.
Analyze Your Gmail/Email Usage with Mail Trends
Moo. I like them because you can still get the right information across and make use of real images I've taken ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/tags/moo/page2/ The only comment I've had back is the 1/2 size is non-standard and easier to loose. Then again my competitive advantage is not in my business cards.
If Alexis hasn't been coding, what has he been doing all this time? I thought reddit was started only by hackers.
this article makes the good point that the mba types who are running vc funds are fundamentally ill-suited for identifying and investing in technology startups. paul graham identified this as true for managers of startups as well; and this is a defining feature of yc--investing in technology people vs. investing in mba types who hire programmers. of course, the logical extension is that the people doing the investing themselves should be technology people because they alone can recognize value in the technology sector. whatever value mba vc types did bring to the table, understanding of business management and such, is becoming less relevant with smaller startups and less money to be allocated.
Content Is Becoming a Commodity
Rethinking the Progress Bar
He draws the alien.

(graphic design and bus dev)
Never mind, I'll just make it in openoffice then share with scribd.
Long-expected Delta-Northwest merger announced
Investment and acquisition issues aside, the reason there aren't more Googles is because... there aren't that many Googles. Their mission statement is huge: "organize the world's information. From the get-go they had a unique algorithm that could do it. They just needed money to keep expanding their infrastructure.

I'm not convinced there are many bold, innovative founders with world-changing inventions that are falling through the cracks. The genius maverick entrepreneur is mostly an imaginary romantic archetype. Many founders these days seem as conservative as investors if you compare the scope of their ideas to Google, Apple, Ebay, Skype, or other projects that did change the world. The modus operandi for founders these days seems to be "aim sorta low and cash out early."
"Why are VCs so conservative? ..."

I just read a fascinating book - Gut Feelings by Gerd Gigerenzer. It's by the guy who did most of the research that Malcolm Gladwell's Blink is based upon. The central thesis was that people have evolved heuristics for decision making that let them quickly make snap decisions more effectively than gathering full information, but a couple chapters were on an interesting corollary: in the absence of hard data on their performance, most people's decision-making heuristic falls back to "Will I be blamed for this decision?"

He provided a bunch of examples from different professions. For example, doctors' decisions often aren't based on solid evidence-based medicine (which is often contradictory), but rather on "Will I be sued if I do or don't perform this treatment?" If you want the doctor's actual opinion, you should ask "If it were your own mother, what would you recommend?" instead of "What would you recommend I do?" - the former shifts the doctor's perspective so that they're thinking "How can I provide the best care?" rather than "Will this person sue me?" A study of UK magistrates found that 92% of their bail decisions could be predicted by the following heuristic: "Did any of the prosecution, police, or previous court recommend bail?" If not, and the defendant commits a crime, it falls into the category of unforeseeable events and the magistrate can't be blamed for it.

A similar effect may be at work with VCs. It's usually impossible to know, even with hindsight, what the opportunity cost of a lost deal was. If a VC turns down the next Google, chances are nothing happens and the company just fizzles. If a VC invests and it goes bust, however, everyone knows. So it pays for the VC to invest like everyone else does: then they can blame any failure on "Well, this was completely unforeseeable: everyone else was sure they'd be a success too." It's the combination of risk aversion, self-interest, and lack of feedback that drives this. If VCs actually had solid conceptual frameworks and good data for evaluating possible opportunities, they could rely on that rather than on their peers' evaluations. (Maybe this explains Sequoia...)
Russell Beattie ends Mowser
I'm curious: Where does the $15k number fit into that? At one point it was explained as "this should be enough money for you to live off for three months" -- if you're funding groups which take 2 years to launch, how are they supporting themselves for the remaining 21 months?
Sign the "Save XP" Petition Today!
Ah, yes, it's good to keep things very concise, and only comment when it adds something of value to the thread. One wouldn't want to muck it up with sarcasm, tired old nerd humor, or pointless whinging in response to a good-natured one-line attempt to subtly point out amusing contradictions endemic in concepts like "social news software".

Good thing we've nipped that sort of thing in the bud, so the beautiful signal can shine through unhindered by noise.
[startup critique] Randomicity - Random sites from across the web
This is a little side-project that I've been working on for about a week, in between my main startup & taxes & moping around from being rejected by YC. It crawls the web for sites (only frontpages, not the full text like Google), and then displays a random selection of 20 on each refresh. The problem I'm trying to solve is that I'll likely need a new idea for my startup, yet there's a whole World Wide Web out there and I've never explored 99.9999% of it. Most social news sites try very hard to give you sites you'll like, but I don't want sites that I like; I want sites I've never heard of.

I initially had the idea for this about a year ago, but dismissed it as "Something so simple couldn't possibly be useful." But recently, I got to thinking about Paul Buchheit's blog posts on humility, and Linus Torvald's advice on starting from a trivial problem and expanding it, and Evan Williams' success stories with Blogger and Twitter. Maybe humility isn't just acknowledging that the big idea you've pinned your hopes on may fail; maybe it also involves acknowledging that all the little ideas that you've dismissed as being incredibly stupid might also succeed. So here's my incredibly stupid little idea. If it fails, I only invested 3-4 coding days in it, and it'd be worth it just for the Django and BeautifulSoup practice.

Unlike past side projects, I will be maintaining and updating this, as long as it remains fun (i.e. as long as there're cool hacks that'd make it noticeably more useful). I don't have any grand plan for it; my development process is basically "Look at feedback e-mails, implement those, look at the site, add any features that I think would be useful." If you've got ideas, submit it through the feedback form (which I want to replace at some point; I'm using James Bennett's django-contact-form plugin, and it's a bit heavyweight for this purpose) or post here.
It's great to hear discussion around Umair's thought patterns that add even more depth...

I think what he was trying to say might be a little different from PG's interpretation...

Umair might have said, "every company that had the potential to be economically revolutionary over the last five years sold out [to an acquirer devoid of strategic imagination or the capabilities to discontinuously continue their trajectory]," ergo ending the disruption gravy train.

That is, it's not necessarily "selling out" that blows things up; it's selling out to companies only driven to "increase market share", etc.

Or something like that.

I also think it is really interesting how your view of how the GOOG acquisition/IPO story played out vs. Umair's version:

"If all Larry, Sergey, and Google's investors had wanted to do was to sell out fast to the highest bidder, they could have done so at any time. But they didn't: they chose to revolutionize something that sucked - and so a tsunami of new value was unlocked."

That clearly doesn't square with how you saw it (even though it's an inspiring revision). I unfortunately lost my copy of Battelle's book before I got this far in the story, otherwise I would weigh in.

Clearly PG, Fred, Umair, and other smart ones agree on the need for more, smaller risks and purposeful management.

At any rate, whoever these "new investors" are that are going to fill the void between bottstrapping at Series A are going to make a FORTUNE. And they can't show up soon enough!
Modal Kombat! A Comparison of 8 different modal lightbox javascript libs
you'd figure they can get more money (from angels/vc's) before they launch if what they've got so far is impressive.
The article makes some good points on the effects of funding on startup success, but it doesn't mention one the
"other" reasons there aren't more Googles (or Microsofts, or Ebays): huge markets that startups can disrupt so successfully are rare. Facebook, for example, which is probably the biggest startup success story since Google, could be doing everything right but it may never be as big as Google because it's playing in a smaller market.
Sometimes I get the feel that dynamic languages (namely the scripting crowd, like Python or Ruby) don't have much semantic checking not because they can't, but because they can use their reputation as dynamic languages to give them an excuse not to. "Since we're dynamic, it's too hard to have semantic checks!"

Which may be true, I don't know. But sometimes I find myself thinking, what if Python analyzed its code like this... then it could detect so and so prior to runtime!

Same thing with speed - CL seems to prove that you can have good speed in a dynamic language.
I've worked with threshold logic like that for collecting and analyzing traffic on telephone switches where an alarm or notification would be generated if the threshold was broken.

Personally I would never want to debug something like that using a statistical probability that something might have gone wrong. Better to fail gracefully with something like multiple chains so that when a request chain goes down it gets logged, cleaned up, and recreated.

Worst case scenario they get a request timeout warning.
Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments... If you're investing at a tenth the valuation, you only have to be a tenth as sure.

I don't agree with this. The investors have to be just as sure of the risk involved in each valuation as before in order to have the same expected value for the overall portfolio. However, investing $400K in 5 companies instead of $2M in a single company will reduce the variance of the return on investment.

I think it's a tradeoff for the VCs between variance in the portfolio and the amount of work involved in finding 5 times as many companies. Given the amount of funding they deal with, I can understand them leaning towards the companies looking for $2M rounds.

It seems obvious. But I've proposed to several VC firms that they set aside some money and designate one partner to make more, smaller bets, and they react as if I'd proposed the partners all get nose rings.

As I pointed out above, the partner has to be just as sure of each of the 5 bets as he would be of one. I'd react the same way if someone suggested I'd do better at my job if I worked 5 times as hard.
This is a great article, and nicely articulates the differences I see between a lot of the bootstrappers I know and the accepted wisdom on Hacker News.

In a down economy it's safer to target an existing cost stream, prospects become very risk averse about value. A lot of technologies start out as cost savers and transform: e.g. VoIP vs. POTS, initially a cost saver, now allows a much richer set of options, repeating the pattern of TCP/IP vs. SNA.
"In the summers, Dr. Wheeler would retire with his extended family to a compound on High Island, Me., to indulge his taste for fireworks by shooting beer cans out of an old cannon."

Awesome! People like to shoot that kind of stuff out of PVC pipes around my parts.
Every logical mind (even within Google) in 1999 would have seen that Google was heading for failure

I didn't think that. I remember telling the powers that be at Yahoo in 1999 (I worked there then) that they ought to buy Google, and it was the only company I ever suggested they buy.
You decide before you realise
we sold early :(
WebKit: Introducing CSS Gradients
How do you separate the seemingly bad from the actual bad?

This is basically the business YC is in. The short answer is: practice. One day I'll try writing down the long answer.
Not A Misprint: AOL’s Platform A Is The Top Advertising Network By Reach
whatever value mba vc types did bring to the table, understanding of business management and such, is becoming less relevant with smaller startups and less money to be allocated.

I completely agree. The answer isn't to convince VCs to invest in companies they aren't suited to be messing around with. Something new needs to happen. PG pointing it out to outsiders should help the free market in the right direction...
Suppose your threshold for investing in a startup is an n% confidence that they'll one day have a market cap of a billion dollars.

Suppose instead you split that investment between 10 companies at a tenth the valuation. How confident do you have to be that any given one will become a billion dollar company? You have the same percentage in all these companies that you would have had in the case of a single, big investment, so now you only need one of the 10 to succeed in order to get the same return.
Holy crap, now I have no reason not to use EC2.
Is this seriously a problem? No programmer is forced to use GAE, and if it seems like you won't do well with it, don't use it.

Tempest in a teapot, indeed.
Lighthouse 2.0 Deployed
That clearly doesn't square with how you saw it

These statements don't conflict. They didn't sell out to the highest bidder, because the highest bidder wasn't offering enough, but they had a number.
This makes complete sense if you assume that a company that only needs a few hundred thousand to "figure things out" has an equal chance of becoming a billion dollar company as a company that is looking for a multi-million dollar investment that "is already taking off." That's evident to us inside, but your own description of the companies is enough to make a VC understandably skittish.

I understand your overall point, and I agree with it, but I don't think this assumption was clear the first time I read through the article.

I wholeheartedly agree that convincing VCs of this isn't the way to go, and that others are going to make a killing by stepping in. My main point is only that the VCs aren't being irrational.
Apple's Market Cap now bigger than Citicorp's
As FSJ put it, "Which would you rather own: a portfolio of sub-prime mortgages or a portfolio of iPhone patents?"
I poked around some in news.arc from the download on arclanguage.org; it looks like the newscache macro does quite a lot of heavy lifting... I recall reading someone having some weird issue with the way w/uniq's gensym works (vs. mzscheme's) - is it possible some change has been made to that functionality in the past month or two?

Unless of course Patrick is generating requests that perform functionality, like logging in, up/down voting etc... Then the idea is totally moot since you'd be hitting a much larger cross-section of functionality.

I don't really know Arc and it's intimidating making suggestions knowing the caliber of people looking at the issue; but I figured sometimes an opinion from someone who isn't intimately familiar with the code can be at least a little helpful. If not, feel free to ignore this post completely =D
Well, not entirely a surprise. I wonder what miker will be doing now?
Change a button, gain 20% — the scientific way
How does CRV's QuickStart program fit into all this? They appear to be attempting to bridge the gap and be in a position to put in $250k.

http://www.crv.com/AboutCRV/QuickStart.html

It sounds like a savvy move. But I haven't heard of a single instance of someone using it, successfully or not!
Shyftr
AGE is the reason. SOFTWARE is the YOUNGEST OF ALL SCIENCES.

I doubt that the reason has a lot to do with valuation and acquisition. The simple reason is AGE. the WEB is still young. Seriously the web is really less than 20 years old. And please do not tell me that NASA and the NSA were using the internet 50 years ago. Medecine has been around thousands of years. Same for Architecture and Mathematics etc..... But the science of Computers and Computing is still an INFANT. Whether there are more acquisitions in the future or less, there will be tons of more Computing Innovation just because the field will MATURE. We still have not grasp the full potential of this field and frankly i think Google is just a drop of water in the ocean of possibilities.
Maybe I'm just old (and by old I mean almost 40) but this is the only business model that has ever made sense to me.

I'm obviously impressed with the Facebooks and the HotorNots and everyone else who manages to make a truckload of money without any actual product or service (that I can identify the value in anyway), but I can't ever seem to get interested in doing "business" that way.

For me, if you don't actually have a real customer, or what you're doing doesn't make them money, then what have you built? It doesn't sound like a business to me...but I might just be old.
Every logical mind (even within Google) in 1999 would have seen that Google was heading for failure

From a make something people want theory of value, they were worth way more than anybody back then. I used to jump from engine to engine trying boolean queries, metacrawlers, keyword mixing, etc, coming up snake eyes.

I think most engines were on the 'portal' kick, which I think meant beating people over the head with banner ads and trying to force them to go to content partners. I think if those sites just stopped for a second and histogrammed what users used rather than what they were trying to force them to do, it would have been absolutely obvious that search was the key.
People whose name is Lane tend to have addresses with “lane”
Ask YC:  What would happen in social news if people submitted/voted on short search engine queries?
There would be no title or URL, just a short search engine query.

Would this be interesting? Would it result in more variety?
which is fine. now you are assured and more confident. you won't sell your next gig so early! :)
Poll: Unknown or expired link on YC
I'm seeing this a lot more often these days, even when just pressing "More" at the bottom of the main page without being logged in.

It makes me think the current continuation-based session scheme isn't enough to guarantee a good experience.

What do you folks think?
I spend a lot of time on YC and I'm seeing this a lot too.
I spend a lot of time on YC but I don't encounter this very often. Are you sure it's not just you?
Even though I don't spend much time on YC, I still see this problem more than I should.
I don't see this often but I don't spend much time on YC either.
I don't know what you're talking about.
The video equivalent of a book is any imaging screen. Cathode ray tube, LCD, whatever. That's not inherently bad. The social construct of mass one-way transmission coming in through an imaging screen and paid for with advertising, which is ultimately designed to modify your child's thinking, is not healthy in the context of the standard biopsychosocial model of disease. We didn't evolve to handle professional psychological manipulation by the age of two. If we had, then it would be healthy. But we didn't. So it's unhealthy.
There's this one idea I've had for some time for progress bars. Say you have a progress bar for a lengthy operation (duh). For example, the progress bar for loading a certain level in a certain game. On successive loadings of the same level on the same machine, the "signature" of the loading should be the same. So you could cache how much time it takes on the first time you load, and on subsequent loads you hope the loading will have the same behavior and make the progress bar grow smoothly, proportional to the time it takes.

That was the simplest scheme, you can go much further. You could separate the loading in chunks (say, 20 chucks of 5%) and see how much time each chunk takes (you get the ratio displayed progress/actual progress). On the next loading, if a chunk takes more time than the last time then you adjust the rest of the indication of progress appropriately to compensate.

Even better, instead of only considering the last loading you could develop a statistical model over many loadings of what is likely to vary and by how much. Maybe you could even take the system's load average (as provided by the OS) into consideration.

I think this guessing scheme, though failure-prone, would make progress bars much more accurate for common scenarios. It would be better than just accepting that most progress bars will be broken and inaccurate like we do right now...
whatever value mba vc types did bring to the table

I still don't understand how they are valued at all. They don't invent anything, don't know how to help people who do, and are often bad at caretaking what has been built.

This is not meant as a swipe at them, but I honestly do not understand why they are highly valued.
I enjoyed the essay.

VC's likely believe lowering the dilligence and involvement level lowers the likelihood of success. If VC's believe, rightly or wrongly, the success rate drops from 10% to 5%, then by lowering selection criteria and involvement, they've lowered the rate of return by diversifying into a pool of lower quality. The key is whether those things really matter. In justifying their paychecks, however, they are vital.
Wow, I should read my threads more often. Keep it up! Care to share any updates? More or less TV now? As for us, now, I don't think anyone bothers to open the giant wood box in the living room now unless company's over. I'm thinking about putting a planter in there.
Any in the Boston area stand out? I know the east side is a lot more conservative as a group.
The first sentence is an unsubstantiated assumption and, as a parent, I can tell you it's wrong. The less a child knows, the less context they have, so the less room you have to negotiate an agreement. Plus, their knowledge level is intimately tied to their memory span, their language, their capacity to understand their own emotions, and all the things you and I still grapple with, but at least we have more context and language. And even then, if you subscribe to the ideas of George Lakoff, our life experience may be sufficiently divergent that we still can't arrive at an agreement. I think that divergence is what led you to make the original statement, that the less you know the easier it is to reach a simple agreement. It's tempting to follow that one variable, divergence of life experience, back to a singularity, but that neglects the many other variables at play in real life.
as if they are capital intensive with low risk?

Hardware companies are not inherently low risk because they involve hardware. They are often, in fact, capital intensive and high risk. See early PC makers, telecom bust, pen computing, etc...
I remember my search engine of choice was hotbot, because they had advanced search on the front page. And you sure as hell needed advanced search then.
Frustrations with development languages
What is/was Mowser? There's no obvious link in the article. I'm guessing it had something to do with mobile browsing.