skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So how's this different from Digg - submit news to different categories, which sounded like what you News Network is about, except Digg does not allow you to create your own category (aka your News Networks) which I see as a plus. However, wouldn't there it be hard to find News Network from 600 "News network" with only 2000 users. What happens when you have 20000 users and 6000 News network. Finding a News Network could be a nightmare.. no?

I think you guys are using Rails, but the site is just so dogslow, why? Perhaps consider adding more mongrel instances, are your servers hitting its load with only 2000 users? The slowness of the site sorted of turned me off when I first tried the site. Remember social news is a tough market to fight in, so the first impression counts.

I also suggest you post your design competition on 99designs.com, I'm not sure how many people knows about your design competition. A $1000 prize would definitely draw a lot of entries.

Any finally, is Jason Goldberg - the Jason Goldberg from Jobster? Just curious.
Maybe that's the next big change: the acceptance of apartment working. If it was legitimate to work at home/have shared spaces, you might see a lot more startups that take their time, are in it for the long haul, and (perhaps) more focus on better products.
Does make you wonder - why port PDFs to be cross platform when they already are?
I think the post is misleading:

What you buy when you invest in a startup is the opportunity to make your investment back tenfold or more within a relatively short timeframe. With that kind of potential payoff there is obviously a huge risk. So if the founders have done whatever they could to make it work and it still tanks, well bad luck to everybody. But it's part of the deal.

If you want a safe investment buy government bonds.
That's interesting. Enron also hired a lot of their top managers and traders from McKinsey.

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm
I don't doubt that there is value in some of this stuff, but a problem that seems to be quite frequent is this: the more honest people out there can easily teach most of their clients most of what they need to know in a day or two, so unless you can land clients who really just don't want to get their hands dirty, it's tough to get a recurring revenue stream going.

Anecdote: at the last place I worked, we had a guy come in for an interview. Bright guy, and came across as being straightforward, but he was really insistent about having an 'ongoing' type of deal, whereas the boss already had read a lot of what the guy knew, and so decided against it. I think the boss might have sprung for a day or two of consulting, but certainly wasn't going to go for anything more than a one-off.
What is Your Idea Worth?
The topic is about recovering from a crashed HD, and it was an humorous way to keep the comments focused. Relax, I won't down mod you (it's impossible).

Of course, a backup is the best solution, but it doesn't bring data back to tell someone "You should have ...".
Buzz Marketing
Indeed. I think CSS shouldn't have variables. You should use a server-side program dynamically creating your CSS, perhaps, but CSS variables seems like more trouble than it's worth.
Seth Godin - "All Marketers are Liars" - Did he mean - "All Marketers are Cheats", as well?
As an aside, it seems that people post comments to blogs without reading the comments before. Every single one of them says, "post this to python-3000/ python-dev". I'm not sure why I'm surprised.
Wow, I didn't know anyone was so paranoid about their own employees that they went out of their way to block network storage. Do you work for the DoD or something?
"The shutdown is intended to keep the system from becoming overloaded with data and potentially giving controllers wrong information about flights, according to a software analyst cited by the LA Times."

What the hell? Data overload?? Maybe someone should tell them about garbage collection?...

Daniel
The comments are outrageously hilarious. It is unbelievable how much energy is spent by some people to prove that someone is "wrong"!

It reminds me this cartoon:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png
Awesome idea! We can call it the Common Business-Oriented Language

Oh, wait...
Ask YC: What do you think about Twine?
A friend just told me about Twine (http://www.twine.com/about) and it looks interesting, but their site is pretty vague. Can anyone here share some thoughts on Twine?

I signed up for the beta but I don't know how soon to expect an invitation. My friend signed up for the beta a while ago and still hasn't gotten an invite.
Yes, this was a pure consulting company. The chaff actually stayed in-house and built the crappy time-keeping systems we all had to use to report our hours :-)
The Slump Doesn't Stop Startups
I am not on MySpace, Facebook etc... I have email, IM and a telephone for networking. I know there are a lot of interesting people out there that I'll never meet but who has time for all these 'friends'?
Ask PG: Can you please provide statistics of YC funded cos?
Just wondering whether you can provide numbers for the companies you've funded - such as how many of them got acquired, how many of them got VC funding, how many closed their shop, how many are still running well and making some good money etc.
thanks.
More importantly, sounds like MS is not really to blame.
1000000000000% true !
OMG OMG THEY STOLEZ MAH CONTENTZ!

j/k

If you liked reading that, you'll probably like reading my blog, http://redditAll.com, in which case, you'd really like my current project, http://breadpig.com, unless you're not into pig superhero-led uncorporations -- in which case, what the hell is wrong with you?
See everyone there. I'm Mark Bao - Avecora
What about newsvine? I believe you guys are awfully similar.
here is my business model,

tell me your keywords,
I give price for top 5, bottom 5 in G,Y,MSN
add all the top 5, bottom 5, together (thats total amount)
half down, then half when rankings are achieved for 3 weeks

deliverables

monthly report, (links, on site optimization, off site optimization)

after getting positon the amount due would be the second half of total price, then if you wanted there would be a maintenance package of $x or $X /mo to keep gaining links and thus stay on top.

*if your rankings can't be achieved you get your 1/2 down back.
- in this model also includes transparency of links and methods also education of client, no hold barred Q&A anytime phone call etc...
Hm... I though 'fake money' had something to do with social network valuations... If so, Marc indeed should know everything about that.

Anyway, I just wanted to say a word in defence of poor hedge fund managers. Some members of this forum will get rich enough to use their services (or become one of them -- like Peter Thiel). Recycling populist cliches about evil bankers and globalisation is soo like... Reddit? ;)
Surely it would reduce the number of comments as it still loses some.

As the author says - a CAPTCHA solution reduces comments significantly, lets say by 50%. So if Mollom marks 10% as spam, and half of those are actually legit, 2.5% of comments are lost.

But that's not a bad price to pay for getting an hour of your life back a day.
I would have loved to say "that's what happens when you switch from UNIX to Windows servers" but you're right, it doesn't look like it's caused by Microsoft.
Funny it's on go.com.
I think websense blocks pretty much anything that looks remotely like you could use it for personal purposes instead of business. They seem pretty harsh.
The real trick to early retirement is making money and not spending it.

Let's say you save 1/3 of what you make and your your investments pay 7% over inflation it should take 21 years to retire. So starting at 21 you could retire at around 42.

If you save 1/2 of that (17%) it's going to take around 28 years so your 21 + 28 = 49.

At 10% your looking at around 34 years or 21 + 34 = 55. But at 50% your talking about 10 years or 21 to 31.

PS: Taxes take a big bite out of this so it's almost not reasonable for most people to really save more than 1/3 of what they make. And plenty of people don't start at 21 which changes things.
It is foolish to blame startups for this. Non-business consumers will not, with extremely rare exception, pay for anything online. There will always be another startup that will be willing to give your product away for free if it's successful. So what does suck? Consumers.

Also, the iphone doesn't really have much to do with the "web"...
[49.7 days in milliseconds]

49.7 days = 4 294 080 000 milliseconds

[2^32]

2^32 = 4 294 967 296

It's not 'data overload' but overflow of an unsigned 32-bit int time field they're worried about.
Since it's not attributed on the page, the actual writer of this is Streeter Seidell from College Humor: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1752773
We'd funded 80 as of January. Of those, 57 are still alive. The others either merged, died, or got bought. 6 got bought (Reddit, Infogami, Textpayme, Zenter, Anywhere.fm, and Auctomatic). I think only 1 other merged. So 16 must have died.

I think 10 have so far done series A rounds, but there will probably be more of those in the future. Nearly all the rest are either funded by angels or (esp in the case of the most recent group) still raising money.

Edit: I forgot Parakey. So make that 7 got bought, and thus 15 must have died.
http://freebase.com would probably like to gather and hold your data. They have a nice GUI for editing it. People are starting to make other sites that use freebase, e.g. http://www.dipity.com/
Book darts (http://www.bookdarts.com/) are another option. Precise marking without the bends caused by paperclips.
This may be old news, but the thing that is interesting is that a minor is running the business (at least that's what I got out of seeing an interview with her), and when I took business law, one of the topics was contracts and minors (under 18 years of age in the US). Minors are not obligated to uphold binding contracts. The example the professor used whas if you sold a car to a minor, he crashed it, he could legally return it, demand a full refund and you would have to legally comply.

A little search found something on the web to corroborate:
http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_22/b3683155.htm
SearchYC Firefox Plugin
I'll probably come.
My favorite part of the comments is the hate on how he is essentially stealing from the system.

In Canada:

The cumulative EI surplus stood at $54.4 billion at March 31, 2007, about three times as high as necessary (annual payouts are ~16B). They recently increased the length of time you need to be employed before receiving and reduced the time you can be on EI.

The system is essentially taking more money out of everyone's pockets than it needs to. Who is doing the stealing?
Putting Semantics Where the Data Is - Quick transation to hListing
"There will always be another startup that will be willing to give your product away for free"

If you're product is so easy to copy that another company will be able to give customer the exact your product for free, then yes - lame startups are to blame. Gimp has been "giving Photoshop away" for years but it doesn't stop Adobe from charging $600 for it.

How can you blame customers for not willing to pay you for what you've made? Imagine General Motors blaming Americans for not buying enough Silverados in their quarterly earnings report.

Business models employed by most "Web 2.0" startups are old. They're nothing but electronic versions of magazines. There have always been subscription-based periodicals, 100% ad-supported publications and many more in between. People always paid for the good stuff.

The problem is: that there is "nothing to read", and of course there isn't, since most startups aren't solving the problem of "creating". Instead everybody is into sharing, discovering, aggregating.

Just imagine a news stand with hundreds of magazines that have short snippets of actual articles from another magazines, claiming that their "content" is pre-filtered to fit your preferences by thousands of editors.

Will you pay?
Does it simply discard them, or leave them someplace for approval?

I'm using Akismet on my blog, and comments considered spam are held in limbo where I can approve or delete them. No comments should be lost unless I accidentally misjudge a flagged comment.
The artcile is dated 21 September 2004. Does it make sense to revisit something 4 years old?

(I am new to hacker news, not sure if posting older articles are okay)
Are any of them profitable, in the DHH sense?
Have you also posed this question to a Medical Forum? Of course the people here are going to advocate entrepreneurship.
Everyone does steal photoshop except for when it is for business related use. So you have not invalidated my point.

Again, don't compare non-web products to web based. It is vastly different.

Yes it is perfectly fine to blame the normal customer for what he wants and what he is willing to pay. I myself have very different tastes than the normal customer. At least faulting the customer makes more sense than blaming the startups that are just doing what makes the most money. The consumers can change their mind about what companies they will make successful but the companies cannot change what the customers desire.

No real exit is based around the "magazine business model".
i like this one:

"Everyone needs computer programming. It will be the way we speak to the servants."
Top 10 Memory Hacks
Zenbe: Next-Generation Webmail, With A Platform Twist
The best advice I ever got (25 executives respond)
Can you explain how "profitable" is different than "DHH profitable"? :-) 37s didn't invent profitability (or simplicity for that matter).
I'm pretty sure Wufoo is in the DHH/37sig sense.
Clearly profitable was the right word, but I think he meant to ask how many companies have profitable revenue streams versus those that have money in the bank from being invested in or bought out.
There is a lack of specific information as to why YC companies die. Your generalizations are extremely helpful, but is there some repository of stories as to what happened in each case?

A ping out to all companies to report on their status might be the best way to go. Then you'd hear from those still living, which is how not to die, right? :)
The 7 Most Aggravating Assumptions About Freelancers (and entreprenuers) Who Work From Home
grrr...so true.
Yeah, it's sort of convincing, isn't it? I have a Canon MP730 that was great, but doesn't talk to Linux or Mac. Faxing's no good since I got rid of the land line a long time ago. Still makes copies. Meh.

Anyway, plastic kills the planet.
Having driven cross country twice in the past 5 months, I tell you that wifi is not nearly as common as you might hope. Edge network from an iPhone was absolutely necessary.
A Clojure web server in (less than) 100 lines of code
Didn't Windows 95 have a bug where it would crash after 49.7 days because the counter used to keep track of its uptime overflowed?
What if the question was rephrased like this:

"Among the profitable startups, how many 'got the eyeballs first and monetized later' and how many went for the profit-first model?"

(latter was termed by grandpa comment as "DHH profitable")
What has changed? In Woz's day, there were very few great programming jobs. HP & Bell Labs were two well known companies that had them. Giving one up was a big risk, if you loved programming. Today there are thousands of companies to chose from or you can easily roll your own.

Most programmers who are not ambitious tend to become dead wood soon enough. I've known lots of them. Top programmers, who still enjoy programming have a tendency to move on. At least that has been my personal observation.

There are always exceptions to the rule, we are talking in huge sweeping generalities here. YMMV.
Again, don't compare non-web products to web based. It is vastly different.

No they aren't. Flickr Pro, Quicken, Mac OSX and the toaster in my kitchen are all exactly the same: I saw them, liked them and paid money to get them.

Stop thinking that you're different. First, you aren't. Second, it's not healthy.
Startup School 2008: Jack Sheridan's (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati) presentation
What about SnipShot? $9/month for premium features.
Derren Brown's book, 'Tricks of the Mind', has an interesting section on memory:

http://www.amazon.com/Tricks-Mind-Derren-Brown/dp/1905026358...

He discusses the 'loci system', 'memory palaces', and 'peg system':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_peg_system

I haven't tried them out myself yet.
I agree about using a server-side program to dynamically create CSS, but I still think it would be beneficial to have CSS variables.

First, having native support for variables in CSS would eventually simplify the implementation of a proper (separation of variables from declarations among other things) "CSS compiler". It would also promote a better style of CSS because I don't think very many people use a framework with CSS variable/declaration separation.

Second, in theory CSS is the domain of designers and they presumably use "standard" tools to edit CSS directly so they don't have variable support I'm guessing?... I'm sure we could be surprised how much CSS is edited by hand.
Are You Frustrated With Firefox?
You pay money for anything you like regardless of if there is a free version that is just as good in every way?
That was the point. You have to build up the small muscles that support your spine. Until that has happened, your lower back will hurt ... but that is a good sign. Once the muscles have developed, you can sit for hours and your posture is dramatically improved. That is what happened for me.

But now I'm thinking standing or walking is the way to go. There is deep evidence that walking while working improves performance ... and is more fun.
And, really, if you head a bit north, San Francisco.
Q&A: IT vet Gordon Bell talks about the most influential computers
you can email a self-hosted wordpress blog, i'd image you could do the same for a wp.com one. subject = title, body = post body, you'll have to set a default category for incoming email posts
WhoShouldiFollow? Twitter Friend Suggestions
voted you up simply for the awesome username
The man who grew a finger
Astrobotic Technology: off to win Google's Lunar X Prize, from CMU winners of Urban Grand Challenge
Well, I agree that everything sucks, particularly the article, it had almost nothing to redeem it.

It not a new problem, thinking of new things is hard, trying to convince people to want new things is harder. I'm pretty sure there's a pg essay about it, it should be practically canonical my now.
OK, OK, so it's really a how-to use jetty from within Clojure, but it is an excellent look into how to consume java classes from within Clojure; which some people (like me) have a hard time envisioning from the docs on the official site.
I didn't think this was too useful. Deeper scraping to find more info about the person (or even some recent tweets) would make me want to follow them.

I've already found myself un-following from people who update too often or too often with banal content, cluttering out the rest.
some video:
http://pop.youtube.com/user/AstroboticTechnology
That's OK, 'cause I know Lisp better than Haskell. I don't mind hacking on software I use :)

I do love xmonad's test suite, though; that is its best feature, and it will be one that's hard to give up. Software without tests makes me lose sleep.
i don't think that's true. good luck getting a machine to stay up that long, but it's definitely possible.
I followed this company when I got word that Paul Allen was investing in the semantic web, and was very interested in AI part of it. I just signed up myself for this, and I am actually pretty disappointed in the way they present and try to connect the data together. It seems like just another wiki-style site to me.

I still think that we have a ways to go in terms of moving towards a more REST-ful and semantic web. I'd love to see a new interface that can use the information on the web in a different medium.
it almost certainly has to do with the win32 function GetTickCount(), which rolls over every 49.7 days

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GetTickCount
i am having a hard time picturing a treadmill desk. are you joking? if not, do you have any references you can recommend on the logistics of it?
Hey guys. This is Jason Goldberg, from former Jobster.
I started working on socialmedian in January. The team is myself and 9 awesome guys/gals in Pune, India. We're going scrappy, throwing stuff out there and figuring it out as we go.

Some key differences between what we're doing and Digg, Newsvine:

-news networks --> everything starts with topical networks that members create and join and have full control of

-members can feed in news from any number of sources into their news networks, not just rely on user submissions. IN fact, upon entering some topics (like keywords), we go crawl the web and suggest sources the might want to include.

-today, all news networks on socialmedian are public -- anyone can create and join them. soon, we'll also layer on private networks

-Everything on socialmedian revolves around the member's personalized feed on their homepage. Our algo offers up a personalized view on the news unique to each user based on their interests. We'll also be layering on some unique types of filters (e.g. know what certain types of people are reading)

more on the way :) it's early. only been at it 2 months

Join 3-4 news networks, create 1, and then check out your homepage. Then give us some feedback as to how to make this work for you.
The set of things that will change the world is not at all the same thing as the set of things that people will pay for. Linux has come a long way toward changing the world (especially on the server side), and it's free. People happily pay for the Wendy's Baconator and caramel Reese's Cups, but neither is on track to change the world.
thanks - i think it would be helpful if someone can create a table with the status beside each company ... this can also help people who are interested in doing some kind of analysis of these startups ... 80 is pretty good number to do some valuable study.
my bad...was debating the two terms. It was meant to be tongue in cheek.
If anyone is interested in spaced repetition software (SRS) like SuperMemo, there are two open source projects that are very similar:

-Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/)

-Anki (http://www.ichi2.net/anki/)

I've been using Mnemosyne for a week now, ever since the article in Wired about SRS (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=170542). I've found Mnemosyne to be easy to use and very effective at helping to memorize things. I use it primarily for language learning (Spanish), but I've also used it for learning the syntax of programming commands, dates of important historical events, and identifying the countries in Europe and Africa on a map.
Most recently, he can be found investing $500,000 in a practical-anarchist startup with the grandson of Milton Friedman. Details can be found in this fascinating, but blandly-headlined submission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177505

Audacious? Yes. Awesome? Yes.
Alan Russell: Why can't we grow new body parts?
Sounds like you are one of the 'SEO' folks that most people frown upon.

a) charging a different rate for different keywords you want to hit.

b) not providing a service that is going to work in the long term - doing black hattery to bomb them into the top 5 for a few weeks is going to get them dropped in rankings in the long term.

c) doing 'off site optimization' is not SEO, that's spam.
I dont think it says anything about things people pay for changing the world or even that payment means something will change the world. In fact it says "Or if its free, at least figuring out how to do some stuff that has the potential to really make a difference". In other words if you are not going to make money at least do something important. Clearly linux would qualify.