skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
By the way, I have an idea for you as to how you can differenciate yourself. This idea will seem silly, but it's something I've wanted for a long time.

I use ask.metafilter.com. I'm a daily user. What is really the worst thing about it? There is no sense of community. The site forces you to stay relevant to the question, and you cannot interact with the users directly. You cannot go offtopic, even though many questions just BEG to go offtopic. Think of how usenet used to be. After a while, you knew all the regulars, you knew the personalities, etc. ask.metafilter does not have this because no real discussion is allowed, just answers to the question.

Of course, it's clear why they do this. If you allowed discussion, the answers will become irrelevant.

I have an idea how to solve this problem:

Make each user have a personal "space", "blog", "diary", "miniblog", "question area", "twitter" or whatever you want to call it. When an answer goes off topic, it's moved to the personal area of the user. There, the person can rave and rant as he wishes, and the threads can go in any direction he wants. People can also cross link their answers on frontpage items into their personal area.

This is going to unfocus your site, but you will create a REAL community. The frontpage Q&A will be just as relevant, but behind scenes, there will be a lot of general chatting going on.

A bit like the diaries of K5 or the journals of Slashdot.

Do so, and you'll have a winner. A BIG site. Don't do so and in 6 months, you'll have Alexa of 60.000 and having $700 a month.

And when you get big with this idea, don't forget to send the check to maximus klein at gmail.
Company Stumbles its way to $75 million
Ad Serving Free For All On The Way
The websites of all the YC companies look similar. Have they all been worked on by the same designer?
And by the way, another idea you should follow up on: Occasionally, people post these really interesting questions about breaking up with their boyfriend or something. WE ALL want to know how it goes on. What happened next!? But it never comes, because we lose track of the question. One should have this question as a sort of miniblog or so, so people can post updates, and the interested stay subscribed to the blog. People get notifications that an update or so has been posted.

This is gold I'm giving you here. If you don't get it yet, someday, someone will, and that person will have a huge site.

The core philosophy I am pushing here is that you should not disassociate the person from the question. Human life is all about social interaction. Metafilter kills the social interaction. You should weave it in. Each question should have the capacity to be a mini story, leading to further questions and so on, till you have an interwoven mesh of question and answer, cliques and groups, and real friendships developing on the site. Mirror humanity where you want people to flock to.
Facebook isn't just facebook anymore. It may extend its longevity as a platform.
A little breath of fresh narcissistic air... recommended :)
The author brings up good points. As for as social networks go, I think Facebook has a significantly higher chance of surviving than Myspace, but I suppose that is still no guarantee of continued success. Will be interesting to see what happens over the next 5 years.
Social networks geared for offline success?
Clayton Christensen's Innovation Brain (staying close to your customers can lead you astray)
Big Business Knows Us Too Well (new innovations are taking notes on you)
I think it's just a matter of following a few core design principles in the early stages. Many of the founders aren't designers and the sites were somewhat built learning from each other.
Facebook has a lot of smart people behind it. If these are five things that will definitely kill Facebook, you can be sure that Facebook won't be sitting on these five things for long.

I don't see Facebook staying as just a social network for very long, just as Google isn't just search (not that I'm comparing the two just yet).
"This is now a heuristic I use in my activity."

In case you're interested, there is a method called ASIT (for "Advanced Systematic Inventive Thinking") to help solve problems in creative ways, by forcing us to look where we wouldn't look otherwise (because of cognitive fixation). One of its main assumption is that creative solutions are often to be found near the obvious solutions, and that they are only different in small aspects. Moreover, it tries to turn the origin of a problem into a part of its solution!

The really, really sad thing is that it's a quite formal, very thoughtful, "no bullshit" method (unlike brainstorming) but paradoxically the guys who promote it make IMHO the terrible mistake of selling as if it was some kind of "snake oil" (look at the main website, http://www.start2think.com ) I'm pretty sure it turns genuinely interested people away; myself, I discovered it through a professional training session and wanted to know more but I would never have trusted those websites otherwise.

If you can find the ASIT book by Roni Horowitz (I have the self-published french translation, but I guess the original english one is available somewhere), and can read past the first few pages of grand promises, you'll probably learn very interesting stuff about creativity.
It's the "Web 2.0" fashion, kind of like punk kids all making the same kind of skinny jeans.
It only has 4 points, which says 3 people here don't know actual women. I think that's encouraging!
Idea for Facebook App - Need Candid Feedback
Here's an idea I had for a facebook app. Can you guys please put it through the Ycombinator gauntlet and give me any ideas, or feedback you might have (positive or negative)

The Idea:
A facebook app where you can enter all of your gift certificates/cards, the store, the value on the card, and the expiration date. You will then get notified when the card is about to expire so you can make sure to use it. I still need to think of a way to tie it into the social aspect of Facebook of course.

I got this idea after having three $50+ gift certificates expire on me! There must be a way to get these things organized.
There seems to be no way to see a list of answers I've posted. Am I missing something?
My first thought is that it sounds like a feature of a calendar application, not a feature of a social networking aplication.
There's probably some truth to this, but on the other hand, there are some good UI reasons for following conventions. Graphical conventions can make your application easier to use, because people already know them. The world of UI design is fulll of such conventions: red: stop, green: go, squares: check multiple, circles: check one. US light switches are easier to use than the European kind because they are more consistently mounted in the same direction. Designing UIs is all about finding metaphors that already make sense to people, either because they are used in the real world, or because they are used in some very popular systems people are already familiar with. (E.g., most desktop applications put "find" in the "edit" menu. Does it make sense? Not really. But by now, that's where people look, so that's where you should stick it.)

That said, there are some conventions in recently fashionable web applications that seem to be nothing but fashion. That's less of a UI design thing, and more of a marketing thing. Presumably, there is some sweet spot between total conformism and utter disregard for the contemporary norm that strikes the balance between attention-grabbing and comfort-instilling. Personally, I would say: when in doubt, keep it simple. (That's my personal taste speaking, not any kind of business experience.)
This guy doesn't seem to know much about HTML, and yet... I think I'd consider that he's a guy who does know a thing or two about what he's doing, in his areas of expertise:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/experiments.html
If you're going to do that, why not make a generic "todo" app that can remind you should visit the dentist, or watch a TV program?
Social aspect: what if your friends could claim your gift certificate if it is x days before expiry?
"How long before the millions of people who have piled into Facebook stop checking their profiles every day or, for that matter, every week."

I think that Mr Evans is underestimating the human appetite for gossip. The reason people like facebook so much is not because of its novelty; if that were the case, with the average net user's attention span, the novelty would have worn out by now. The real reason is that seemingly trivial information about people you actually know is exciting to members of a species evolved to live in groups and use gossip as a means of establishing, assessing and maintaining relationships.

Also, I cannot resist the urge to play grammar police. Phenomenon.
Trivial problems can have surprising depth.

http://worldandi.misto.cz/_MAIL_/feynman.html
"Feynman finally broke the depression cycle in a typically Feynmanesque way. He challenged himself to describe in equations the wobbling movement of a spinning plate being tossed in the air by a student in a Cornell cafeteria. After much effort, he was able to show that, consistent with his observations, for a small degree of wobble, a one-to-two ratio between the wobble and spin was indeed valid. When Feynman excitedly described his results to Bethe, the other scientist listened with interest but wanted to know their practical value.
Feynman had to admit that they had no practical value. He had solved the problem because he had fun doing it. This recognition was an epiphany for Feynman. He decided that from then on, he was going to do physics just for the fun of it. Energised by his decision, he went back to problems in quantum electrodynamics that he had started working on while still at Princeton-the work that eventually brought him the Nobel Prize. Ironically, he found that the spinning-plate movement he had studied just for fun also had application to the electron-spin problem."
"as an example, recovering from a failed datacenter that was hosting a petabyte of data over a 10 Gb/sec link will take more than a year"

Does it really? What if you load the data onto some physical medium and physically move it from wherever it's backed up into the failed data center? The latency of vans with disks or tapes may be high, but the throughput can still way exceed that of networks.
Like I said, it's about controlling downside. The downside of losing the lottery is that you lose a dollar. The downside of losing at russian roulette is that you die. It's a mistake to only consider expected value.

Risk is something that should be intelligently assessed and balanced, not blindly embraced.

It's also a mistake to equate "not winning" at startups to failure. I'd rather work at a string of unsuccessful but fun startups than some soul-crushing big company.
Stunning image technology - SeaDragon and PhotoSynth
Way too specific.
cool idea, but it's a pretty small niche/problem to solve -- which is fine, but maybe not something to expect millions of people to use
In Massachusetts, gift cards / certificates are not allowed to expire or lose value unless they're dated. And if they do have a purchase date or expiration date, then 7 years is the deadline, regardless of what the expiration date actually says.

http://www.mass.gov/treasury/gift_cert.htm

But, a coupon, especially a $20 coupon that saves you money on something YOU want, can be just as good as a gift certificate--and would still be allowed to expire in a few months, even in Massachusetts. So, this idea is still useful for Massachusetts.
Now this is something. And it can perhaps be generalized to giving away other property you can't enjoy yourself. I might ask some of my friends if they had use for some stuff I have lying around, but certainly not every friends' friend.

Then there are rebates, discounts...

How to make social trading for small items?
This comment was more valuable than that "top ten secrets to success" digg bait.
Maybe self-ref posts could submit a text description that always stays at the top?
I'm going to be the first to say... DO IT! If it solves a problem and it's a simple idea, and it lets millions of users access it, you got it. Of course not every person may hear about it or install it, but that goes for any app.

Remember, you can always improve the app later on... such as allowing users to trade coupons of equal value for other things! For example, I found a coupon on a carton of ice cream for a free ice cream at Friendly's... I was going to throw it away, until I read the odds and saw that users had a 1 in 20 chance of getting that coupon. That made me realize it must be valuable. Turns out that coupon is for a FREE $5.99 ice cream sundae. Do I really want to eat that much ice cream in one sitting?

Now, let's say you're in college, and have tons of roommates and friends, and you can easily swap gift cards around. Even with college students you don't know, just to make new friends. For a $6 movie ticket or something. So I don't have to eat that ice cream, BUT someone else can get the benefit of it.

I don't know. Let the users figure it out. Especially when you're 18 and 19 and shy, it makes it easy and fun (especially in nerdy majors) to do something like that to get conversation started.

Or let's say someone gets a $50 gift certificate to Abercrombie and Fitch, but they don't wear those clothes, or they wear Tall sizes, and that store doesn't carry anything. Should they throw it away? Why not trade it, like for a $50 used textbook.

Then, eventually you become cool within your college and also your professors give you good recommendations. It's also something that you can talk about 2 years from now when you're doing even cooler things.

Creating something is the best thing a person can contribute to society. The ONLY reason not to create something is if you have another immediate project where you can help even more people and more realistically, in which case you would create that other thing. Otherwise, creating wins. Just say to yourself that you will simply spend 2 days on it, and make it happen.
But it could fit into a social application well -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30420)
Twitter meets podcasting? (Innovation in progress, Dave Winer style)
Non clipjacked version here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 . If you haven't already checked out the other TED videos, there is all kinds of good stuff in there. Its also a good example of how a flash video player should be.
It could be added very quickly adding a static textbox... eg: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com+S3+uploaded+file+safe
for example.

"... how do you know when your uploaded file is 'safe'? ..."

don't know. might have to find this out.
Facebook's biggest limiting factor is the word "friend". My co-workers are my co-workers. My family is my family. The dude I met the other day at a networking event is just a dude I might want to keep in touch with. None of these people are my "friends".
It'd be easier to just let the site get too big, sell it to a major company, and then start over. You can't lose!
What if you generalize this one step further to allow bartering of any kind. I think bartering is by nature more fun than transactions involving money, and although the facebook marketplace probably allows barter ads the features are designed more for transactions with money. If you built a system around bartering and pushed the fun aspect, you may be able to work alongside the facebook marketplace.

Of course, now I have gotten completely away from the original idea, but I'm just putting the idea out there.
Twitter meets podcasting, day 2 (Innovation cont, Dave Winer style)
Andrew Chen: "Facebook app users are potentially worth about 1% of what users on your website are worth"
I think he should do the simple idea first, release it right away, then either expand that idea, create another app on facebook, or simply do NO FURTHER MODIFICATION at all. It doesn't HAVE to be this all-encompassing time-consuming project to be worthwhile.

Why debate what may happen 3rd or 4th generation when he needs to create something in the first place? He's excited about a simple idea, and that is what he should do. Why should he worry about what he may or may not (if he chooses to) do in addition to the original idea he's excited about? That's a bad trap to get into. Thinking that one needs to have everything planned out is why few people ever start or finish anything on their own initiative.

Does it solve a problem? Is it something you will use? Is it something you can be proud to show others (e.g., it's not porn)? Are you excited about it right now? Then, create it. If thousands of other people like it, great! If not, it will still save him $150 a year and give him something to talk about.

Not every idea has to be stretched out to the point it might take you 6 months to create (which translates to 1 year actual time.)
All of the high end (Nokia S80 style) phones can do flash light but there are still problems with it. J2ME runs across nearly all phones but some of the older phones (Nokia S40 style) have very small screens and the Java runtime seems to be painfully slow (the cpu's are quite beefy buy I suspect the memory access is slooooow). Be aware that despite it being Java there are quirks across the 50+ mobile phones that are in common use around the world. There are a lot of small companies that specialize in testing across this range though.
The Ipnone sw team member mentioned that because the keys are created as graphics with the touch screen, it would be very hard to dial the phone while driving - not recommended. So I don't think there is any kind of tactile feedback, but I'm sure there is an audio one.
re: daikatana i think you mean john romero, not john carmack (it was ion storm, romero's game co -- though yes it was based on the quake engine/carmack's work)
Ask the Wizard: Employee Options and Grant Size
I thought Java was quite fast on Series 40, but of course it is slow on some phones, no question.
No, but they've all been nagged to fix the same things, which tends to produce a certain similarity.
Thanks - I shall look into it. I remember reading that there were even more issues with J2ME running portably, than there are with Java in the browser on desktops.
I'm always a little wary of self-help topics like this. Particularly if they have titles like "The Power of Yes."

But I want to mention that extemporaneous speaking is, certainly, a remarkable confidence-builder.

There is one greater, however: walking up to a complete stranger and striking up a conversation. Not "so, we're both waiting in this bus terminal, where are you going?", but engage them in a serious subject they have opinions on. Politics or religion, for example. These are very hard subjects to get people to talk about at any length.

Ideally, you will have a goal in mind -- to find out what interests them, to interest them in something, to change their mind about something, even just to find out their name.

Public speaking is theory, but conversation is application. Speaking TO people is secondary, speaking WITH people primary, and changing someone's mind the greatest mark of your ability to communicate.
This makes sense to me. Just do a quick and focused implementation of my idea and see how it goes. I haven't worked with the Facebook API yet, but hopefully this idea wouldn't take more than a month to make.
A couple extra bytes... 16 extra bits
I was just going to mention that.

Instead, I'll mention that he's clearly eating his own dogfood: press coverage of the iPhone has been mostly glowing, and he expects success (readership) through his divergent opinion.

I guess it worked. I read his article (up until it became obvious that he was purposefully overlooking the cellphone camera counterexample), and I wouldn't have read it, had it sounded positive. I don't have time to read any more iPhone Messiah stories.

I feel the same way about the iPhone that I do about almost all Apple products. They're great, they're usually the best, but I'm a freaking pobrecito. I can buy a new surfboard, custom-shaped for my body by the best pro in Ecuador, for half the price of an iPhone. A bargain-basement cellphone is free with even the cheapest plans, I have a $60 mp3 player that works just fine, and I've built capable linux laptops for $300.

I couldn't care less if the iPhone flops and I'm not the kind of person to buy one. But if I had to bet, well ... I don't want to bet against Apple right now.
Lol. Yeah, the poster must not have Tom Leykis on the air in his town. He'd do well to listen to a few episodes. Or just man up.
Can Your Website be Your API? (semantic markup + microformats on public pages obsolete read heavy API's?)
Venturebeat takes an in-depth look at Powerset
there is a balance to everything in life :-)
To clarify, what I am getting at is that smart people are able to see important problems in areas where others see no promise. Not that smart people are wasting their talents or solving the wrong kinds of problems. :-)
Users with lots of friends (traffic) can be courted by sponsors automatically, and include the advertiser's widgets on their page.

These sites are potentially a goldmine because of the contextual information available, but for the sake of advertisers, popularity/age/sex are probably all that really matter -- I guess you could throw in location, too -- so it could be effectively automated.

I like this idea. It seems cynical enough to work.

You're popular, you have lots of 'friends' ... you're a star! Go sell some Doritos!
The other alternative would be just to create an app to anonymously email mom and tell her to stop getting you those Bed, Bath, & Beyond gift certificates for your birthday.
You forgot to add "be a cutie pie".
blog.pmarca.com: Film of the week: Startup.com
I agree with this... you'd be accomplishing the same thing as a generic todo list with a reminder.

Personally, the only way I could see you spinning this into something "worth it" would be the ability to swap unwanted giftcards with friends...

good luck.
"... He has since gone on to run a consulting firm that specializes in restructuring failing startups ..."

and co-founded http://www.jumptv.com with Herman ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24000
That's a great idea. So when you enter your cards, you can choose a time frame for giving away your cards e.g., let me friends claim this card if I haven't used it at least one week before expiration.
Ha ha, that's great.
Do any of the Y Combinator firms use Extreme Programming?
Some context. I am considering a startup. I was blown away by the intensity of Zenter's development schedule. One of my potential co founders is a bit of a fanatic about XP but some facets of the process (especially the religious sloganeering and the use of tests to "evolve" the design ("TDD") ) seems counterintuitive. Also I am a bit concerned that the "big names" of Agile (with a couple of exceptions) don't seem to be hackers just process consultants and most of the experience they have seem to be in creating inhouse corporate software.

If anyone here has used XP or other Agile methodologies (or even fragments from it like "TDD" for e.g) in their startup efforts, please take a moment to jot down your impressions.

How important is it to have the thefounders' coding "philosophies" mesh well?

Thanks in advance.
Do do dooo do do do.

sigh Please take my karma. I hate posts that do nothing to add to the discussion but I could not help my programmed response.
Google To Acquire GrandCentral
Seth Godin's great idea for generating buzz at a trade show
Ask The VC - How Do You Negotiate a Carve Out With Investors?
John Lam on Software: Steve Yegge ported Rails to JavaScript
The Next Big Language (Go ugly early)
Brief interview with Khris Loux, CEO of Js-kit.com
"This is not a company led by one or two brilliant co-founders. Rather, it is a team of now dozens of engineers..."

I hope they IPO really early. When they do I'm going to make a killing. So many people will think they're investing in The Next Google and will then realize they're not.
Wow do I want to look through that codebase.