skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Search engine style ads don't work because people login to see what their friends are up to, not because they're open to buying something.

Ultimately, the answer may lie in some kind of customized event sponsorship:

e.g. you're planning a poker game with your friends, and facebook allows its clients (beer and snack companies for this example) to offer you a deal on those products.

Or something else entirely.

Either way, I agree with the blog post that they haven't found that something yet.
Lisp compiler included with M$ Phoenix compiler framework
The difference between Facebook and Google is Technology, the value of goods is define by its availability/scarcity.
There's nothing spectacular about Facebook technology, Fame alone is not enough to justify those billions if you don't think so let see when they go public.
> if you have customers, nobody cares what your pedigree is.

If you already have customers, you're doing YC a favor by applying.
Handling 200 Million Transactions Per Month Using Transparent Partitioning With MySQL Proxy
A great post. I remember the criticism of Java circa 1997. It has come a long, long way indeed.

Tangentially, this is a reason why many (very smart) programmers stick to "blub" like Java. In practical every day reality, the investments in VM improvements, libraries & tools play a huge role in productivity. As an example, most modern IDEs (really lots of macros in disguise!) take the pain out of most of the verbosity while writing code, and such verbosity actually is a plus for reading code.
Well... by now it should be obvious to everybody that

a) Your cell phone and your iPod should be the same device

b) It should always be connected to the Internet

c) It should be an open platform that everybody could
develop for: I suspect you'll have no issues finding software that downloads your picks into your phone automatically.

The industry, however, is fighting hard to postpone this reality. Not just Verizon, Sprint&Friends (closed networks, locked phones) but even Apple themselves (dumbed down iPhone API, draconian control over developers)
Better Advertising with OpenX
Speed Racer 1967 to 2008
Let Firefox Spell Check Your Blog
I'm amazed at the people who continually doubt the value of YC. Why not just ask those founders who have been part of YC - nearly all of them will tell you being in YC was invaluable. Isn't that all the proof that is needed?
Don’t rely on the tyranny of the democracy. Use this as an opportunity to build a framework based on principle and apply it across the board. When you build constitutions, you have to do it in private, with great minds and based on timeless principles… and weight in fact the true nature of man. In Freedom,
Any other face-to-face meetups that happen on a regular basis? (For my purposes, anything in the Bay Area, especially the peninsula.)
7:30am ?! Why so anti-programmerish? Is it for "business-types" only? :-)
Greasemonkey script to hide stories (based on url) on Hacker News
Even the most scathed and unpopular of opinions, when allowed expression, can add value to discourse provided they don't commandeer and dominate the dialog. Perhaps a voting-based moderation would give us a pre-viewing filter we can use to decide to leave some posts un-viewed? Or a tagging system like Slashdot's? Censorship by a central authority disturbs me--it is a slippery slope and place too much power in the biased hands of a few. Didn't most countries get rid of monarchies and divine right for a reason?
Just played with both. Browsershots is about as good as I'd expect for free. crossbrowsertesting allows interactive testing. Which suits it better for dynamic stuff.. imo
From Al Gore’s Chief Speechwriter: Simple Tips for a Damn Good Presentation
Installing GIT on windows
Hotmail email address. C#/C++ suggest Microsoft platform. Even mentioning C++ in a designer (!) lookup post. Hm... One red flag after another.
Interview with Adeo Ressi from TheFunded.com
> Anyone can bootstrap. Funny.

I am not sure how that is funny. After web applications started dropping like flys about 2000 I decided that I could build my own that would be just as good but without millions in venture capital.
I think banning them is playing into Valleywag's game. They want to be banned. That just increases their "brand equity" a controversial gossip rag. Perhaps they'll receive less traffic in the long run, but I'm sure they love the publicity of this meme.
This is just magical thinking. Google's services scale amazingly well because their hardware and software were optimized, for specific applications, by great programmers commanding large budgets. Google does not have a magic bullet that can make any app in the world "scale", they are not going to rent Steve Yegge to me for $14 per hour to help me design scalable apps, nor are they going to lend me an entire datacenter's worth of computers to ensure that my naive attempt to bubble-sort 1e6 database rows per pageview will "scale" out to 10 million hits per day.

Your Google Apps site is going to have limitations, it is going to have to pay to exceed those limitations, and it is going to have to be carefully architected in order to scale. The original poster notes, correctly, that half of Google Apps' limitations are restrictive compared to those of a $7-per-month web host, and the other half -- the ones that will make or break the value proposition -- haven't been stated yet.
Cringely: New tools and services are (finally) making applications more intelligent.
Study Shows Targeted Ads Make Users Uneasy (59% of users mad)
The Quietest Place on Earth - Orfield Labs
I don't agree, YC doesn't accept a sure thing most of the time they like to gamble and hit the next 'big thing'.

There is one exception in the companies they have taken on but all the rest were not established and only a few looked like a sure thing (auction manager, photo editor, comments manager).
So KML is becoming a portable de-facto standard. Three cheers for compatibility.
this is huge, although i think this needed to come out earlier. rails deployment has already been generally pegged as 'hard' or a 'pain'. I have gotten use to getting a rails app coded fast then getting ready to spend some time deploying.
I don't think it's fair to assume that YC considers the plans of the teams it accepts to be inconsequential.

And to the statement 'now you're giving ownership to people who don't feel about it the same way.' - differing viewpoints about your idea is not a bad thing.

Finally, to reduce YC's value-add to 'marketing budget' is incorrect. Do you think that VC's attend demo day because of YC's marketing?
this guy is awesome, but the funny part is probably a lot of the people at TED could buy an interactive whiteboard for 2k.
Heh, good point. :)
Excellent, I love the ZuckerGnome!
Six US cities tamper with traffic cameras for profit
One easy way for them to make money is to charge some nominal fee (say $15/yr) for premium services or ad-free experience. I don't use facebook myself, but most of my friends do, and most of them would gladly pay a small fee to just keep using facebook as is, nevermind premium features.

Mining the social graph is the holy grail of social networks, but facebook, with its millions of addicted users, doesn't have to solve that problem to generate revenue. It can do so with other means until they figure it out.

IMO, Google was in an even more precarious position before it figured out advertising because people could switch easily. Facebook's got its hooks in your life; you can't switch.
so many fb haters - yet they keep growing users, keep launching features, you can say they have no tech (baseless), they can't monetize (eer ask pg about this one; build something people want - a business model will emerge) and all the rest - yet you can say nothing about their growth and engagement.
Blizzard won't provide an estimate. You can see a nice preview at http://www.starcraft2.com/, and if you look at the FAQ it talks about release (but gives no date).
how about growing users?..hmm thats seems like a valuable way to spend your time if your a consumer web company.
the author is pissed off about the amount of noise being generated in favor of Google App Engine as if it were completely revolutionary...

I just had a thought. Suppose that, hypothetically, several months ago a service very much like the Google App Engine had been released by a small YC company. And suppose that, hypothetically, that product was nearly out of beta and was already hosting apps on a scalable platform with a standard set of open-source APIs and minimal sysadmin hassle?

What level of press hysteria would this product be getting, do you think, relative to this semi-complete beta from Google that doesn't yet have a clear pricing or scaling model?

Would anyone on the Heroku team be willing to comment on the record? ;)

[Note: I haven't used Heroku enough to really compare it to Google App Engine. However, nobody has used Google App Engine enough to really compare it to Heroku...]
I'd pay $15/yr to automatically block all Facebook Apps.

Sadly I don't think I'm alone. It was useful before, but it's gotten increasingly spammy.
Done. With some edits to avoid the wrath of Lander, just in case. At least ESL isn't a vindictive bible thumper like some people in the field. Ahem.

Anyways, I wanted to say 2 things about your site.

1) the registration is painless and fast. Yay.
2) the font size in the textarea is too big. Boo.

Nonetheless, I find this educational and will use or reimplement-the-facade-of this slinknews package for my own use. It seems terrific. It feels like reddit but it sounds a lot easier to set up.

You need more traffic (data) so that you can start mining it :-)
I guess Gmail is better - what is wrong with Microsoft platform the platform don't make product developers do - I have known designers with great C++ skills, why so much negative? We're just seeking help what is so wrong with that?
quick name the only company in the valley that scares googles mngt team?

quick name the only company in the valley thats harvesting googlers like its October in Napa valley?
Is Google the Web 2.0 Bubble?
The Google bubble, and essentially its "burst," is significant because Google acquires more companies than anyone else in the Web 2.0 space.
Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?
I think this should have been run on a symmetrical map with the same number of players of each race.
Good point. In the case I described, someone could gain status in the community by consistently voting up good articles and voting down bad ones. This would add to the other two methods of becoming known to the community (commenting and submitting). Perhaps people who are respected would not want to risk tarnishing their image by supporting a bad article, and the support of people who would be willing to sell their 'vote' would be worthless?

As an aside, I wonder if each of article submissions, comments, and voting could be thought to respectively show that a person is interesting, intelligent, and has good judgment?
Matt's not saying they aren't getting a lot of traffic, or that a lot of people don't enjoy using Facebook (nobody in their right mind would claim those things). Matt's saying that it's a rare form of chutzpah that Zuckerberg possesses that allows him to make up stuff like "the social graph" as justification for his second-place social network being worth 30 times the first-place social network (he's also saying some other stuff, but I think that's the funniest/truest part). And, of course, it takes an astounding reality distortion field for him to be able to convince half the people in the valley that it's a done deal: Facebook is "the next Google".
RDoc 2.0.0
When you have over "65 billion page views per month", you don't need to focus on more users.

You need to focus on getting paid. Fast.

EDIT: In other words:

if Money In - Money Out > 0: Success

if Money In - Money Out < 0: Fail

The number of users doesn't matter.
Facebook will keep on getting more and more users but it just seems that if they want to get to the next level, they need to do something about this App thing. Once they figure it out I don't doubt they'll be able to offer some type of productivity software - they already have the social infrastructure as well as the users in place for that.

When they launched the API and the apps I, as many others, were excited about the entire idea of a facebook OS but it seems that notion is drifting farther and farther away.
Instead of outright banning, can we do something like this:

1. maintain a list of controversial sites
2. every time someone attempts to submit a link from that list, s/he'll get a warning message stating that should the moderators find this submission lacking, 5 karma pts will be docked. No appeals will be allowed. This is the risk of submitting from a blacklisted site. And only users above some karma threshold can submit from the blacklisted sites.

This would still allow possibly useful information from those sites, but also punish irrelevant submissions.
Mack: A Fast, “Best of the Rest” Web App Framework
I'd say if you're looking at the users that 'graduate' from one you the other, you might consider the people who graduate from Facebook to not wasting time on social networking sites because they're busy working and raising a family.
We do a ton of stuff on our credit cards, but really only to scale an already profitable campaign.
Clouds over DB Software
nice point - but myspace was a steal for fox and should be kicking themselves for selling so low. fb's valuation is mind boggling indeed and fb is not the next google - it does however have people excited about something besides the big G which is refreshing. chutzpa is making people believe, not telling the literal truth.
The garage where it all began
Also relevant to 37s philosophy is the fact that they charge for something (chips & salsa) that most people expect to get for free.

Which is why I get my burritos at Willy's :)
First comment:

"Great post. Windows web hosting is still king and that will not change anytime soon. Web hosting has grown such a loyal following that it still going to be very popular. Most of the time businesses will choose Windows web hosting over everything else because of the respect they have for Microsoft and the products they produce."

WTF?
My suspicion is that Facebook will have to change how online advertising works, or die.

Look at Compete data: average stay of 15 minutes * 350 million visits/month = 87.5 million hours / month in the US. That is coupled with decent demographic data and ability to target. How much would that much attention be worth in TV or newspaper advertising? A lot more than Facebook is currently getting, I suspect.

If it can convince major brands that Facebook eyeballs are worth the same as traditional advertising (in effect sell them CPM, not CPC - "Facebook is the new TV"), then Facebook will do quite well. That's a very tough sell for smaller players, but it might not be impossible for Facebook.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158316
Musical Geek Friday #3: Code Monkey - good coders code, great reuse
But then they'd have some kind of rational yardstick for measuring valuation, and we have that -and- keep Zuckerberg a paper billionaire.
Not everyone wants to manage both a front-end server and six little mongrels running around just to run an app.
I'll set up a calendar for startup-related events (that need not be related to news.YC). I think it'd be good to have a place where people can post in their blogs and try to get groups together. I think as soon as you've got three people together you can already have a meaningful meetup.
It would take a more active commitment to transform this site from a news site to a community platform. You can build a community on top of almost any technology up to a certain size. But once you outgrow the everybody-knows-everybody level I think you either have to react with technology or there's some inevitable splintering.

I'm just applying some of the same techniques that I've seen work in OSS; time will tell if they work out in this context too.
Facebook is a bit sticky, but switching is not as hard as you might think. If I had to dump facebook, I could probably rebuild my network (as much as I really cared about) pretty quickly starting with just a couple of phone numbers and emails.
One Response to Rejection
What are you talking about, applications or companies?

If by "bootstrap" you mean "build an app in your spare time while holding down a full-time job in IT at Wells Fargo", you win the argument.

If by "bootstrap" you mean "build a company without funding", implying making payroll, I think you're nuts. It's at the very least incredibly scary to bootstrap a company.
Yeah I'd say a suspension would be more appropriate. Let it expire silently in 6 months or something and see if anything worthwhile starts showing up.
Somebody should start a poll:

Facebook + Email + IM + Phone vs. HN + Email + IM + Phone

Which would you rather have?

I suspect this would provide some valuable information as to the near future of the internet -- so many of us are on HN because it is specific to our current interests -- whether hobby or professional -- and our desire to know and bounce ideas off of similar minds.

Now for specific interests replace HN with (Popsugar, TMZ, Social Investing sites, etc.)
That's a good point, but those players will want fb to adopt big msn style flash ads. I'm not sure fb's users will go for that now.

I think they're going to have to look at membership or some other direct charge to users, and that's going to really affect that inflated valuation.
1. What's with the rails community's obsession with naming things names related to trains? What's wrong with "mod_rails"?

2. "touch tmp/restart.txt" seems like an odd way to signal a restart of your app... what's the reason behind this?
Google Experimental - A cool way to see what your users like
PG always talks about getting your site up as soon as possible and then watching how your users use it. Today I noticed Google Experimental, which I think is a great idea for testing new functionality and looking at how users use it.
While this certainly sounds great, it's really about the lack of a business model that fuels the lack of a need for a business guy.

If you have no business model, then you don't need somebody to execute on that.

And for those who would say "all you need is users and the business model makes it self" think about your daily activities that go above and beyond necessities and ask yourself if the product your consuming had an original business model.

Maybe not absolutely necessary for a "web 2.0" company that is about eyeballs and users, but for a lot of companies , including software companies, it's not about the "business guy" but the business model.
keyboard shortcuts in search results!

http://www.google.ca/search?q=rattlesnake&esrch=BetaShor...
Meet Facebook's new number two
Once these things happen, podcasting may well take off. I know I'd use it much more.
Rails GIS Hacks Tutorial
I think the rails guys are promoting this themselves because it solves the shared hosting criticism for them. Hope this really works :)
Firefox logo spotted in deep space by the Hubble Telescope
I tried it on 2 computers and 2 browsers (Firefox and Opera) and both did not work.

I really would like to try CrossBrowserTesting.com on CrossBrowserTesting.com to find out on which configuration it works...
All of these are good points but the reality is something else. you can take whatever yc says on its face value or simply look at the types of companies they take and the common theme in them as well as the types of persons.
Conversely, I don't like chips and salsa with my burrito, I think it is a waste of money, and that's why I avoid Willy's and Moe's and stick with Chipotle.
GitHub: A Social Network For Programmers
Try deleting your Facebook account and see how much effort it takes. If you're lucky (and the trick that I worked still works) it might be about an hour. Otherwise it might take you days (hint: you have to delete every single photo, comment, wall post, friend, etc one by one and then contact Facebook to have your account deleted).
I go to Qdoba over Chipotle because the chairs/stools at Chipotle are intentionally designed to make you uncomfortable so you don't stay very long.

Baja Fresh was my favorite quick service burrito place, but the local one closed and was replaced by Chipotle. No idea why they closed, they were always packed.
Google Now Fills Out Forms & Crawls Results
So yes, we need to figure out a viable revenue model for twitter to develop and ensure stability within the platform. However its more likely that it get acquired.
I wonder if eBay would do better with a twitter acquisition than Skype.
Wow, this is kind of a big deal. Crawling the deep web seemed like the one real feature Google's vaporware competitors could tout.
I think if you were interested in a particular area, and could download an audio commentary that contributed to this, then that would be useful. For me, pod casting is a new attempt on an old idea called "push" that wants to steer the internet towards broadcast rather than browsing. Consumers spoke on this long ago.

A more fleshed-out version of what I've written here: http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/technology-is-so-1998.ht...
never sign non-competes. just say no.
"YCombinator has it’s own personality. Their opinions are their own. They have perspective and wisdom and the will to apply it. But they have no more dominion over truth as the rest of us, nor are they immune to the blindspots that all beings must endure, nor would they suggest otherwise. It’s taken much for me to fully understand this"

"But none will succeed as YCombinator does, winning successes from strange ideas with unproven players, unless like YCombinator, they cultivate a personality of their own, and call upon their imagination to see as the bright minds applying dream."

"Upon rejection, it couldn’t feel like a group in Mountain View had overlooked our ideas in favor of ideas more compelling to them."
There's another fast food chain that's kind of like this: Five Guys Burgers and Fries. Best burgers I've ever had. And they only serve burgers and fries (the occasional drink, maybe, if you're lucky and you ask nice) and that's it. They make everything from scratch.

I think focusing on something simple and making it super-special is a great way to make a business.
If the ease of deployment was the only feature App Engine had it would still be worth it. Running "appcfg.py update path_to_app/" to deploy your Python app beats all other options.

And anyone complaining about static files and cron jobs doesn't understand that those don't belong on your application server anyway. Google is providing scaling for the application server and the data storage. Static files and cron jobs can be easily scaled. Database servers not so much.
If they are getting voted up, doesn't that mean we shouldn't ban them?
Hmm, that's a great point I hadn't thought of before.

From an employer's perspective I can clearly see given 2 identical candidates why you might want to shy away from the one who has signed a non-compete with a company known for having alot of lawyers like Google or Microsoft.
or you could spend your time making something people want :/
Q about car-circularity
Is the following list car-circular?:

(((1 2 3)) 4 . #7=(((5 . #7#))))

If so, why?
I suppose you are only looking for excuses so that your startup doesn't have to create a Facebook app ;-)
Honestly if you don't know why you were rejected then you need to pitch to more investors and friends. There are tons of angel forums out there. Move to sv and start combing the circuit. YC is a great program but other angels will be way better at giving feedback to your pitch / idea / company. After a few rounds you'll know your weak spots and sell toward your strengths.
it doesn't take much time to contribute something back to the community, whether it's advice on your blog, contributions to open source software or just releasing some of your own work as open source. It will only help later on when you have an actual product/business to launch.