skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Official Google Blog: Putting crowd wisdom to work
"The data suggests that Google may be less powerful than people thought, at a time when the search engine is seeking to widen its empire  and drawing fresh criticism almost every day as a result of its perceived growing dominance."

Analogies to empires and the military are a little silly in the business world. Businesses have very little legal power to force anything. The customers and consumers have all the power when they choose to buy or not to buy from a company.
The apps here (see below) don't look very businessy, and while the demographic I'm targeting isn't perhaps quite the same as existing summary sites, I don't think it overlaps a great deal with the lolcats type users, either. Are there "serious" facebook apps?

http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6191391-9.html?tag=ne.gall.pg
I like the concept. It does resemble twitter in some aspects, but you can differentiate it somehow to increase your chances of success. Some other notes about the design:

- Simplify. It looks busy.
- Get assistance from a web designer to help with the layout and colors.
- Don't put ads on the home page.
- Even on the other pages, use less ads. Especially lose the flashy banners. Why does the registration page have a big flashy banner at the top?

Good luck.
Ehh.. I don't think you could even trim 50% of the features from Microsoft Word and still have a decent word application, let alone 90%.
i agree. i'm using a module system myself and it's way better than OO
The HTML produced has errors, e.g. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fthreads%3Fid%3Dralph
It's from September 2005; although interesting, if you think you've seen it before, you probably have.
Summary: ESPN, MTV, etc., producing video specifically for mobile phones. Didn't read the rest.
The main text on the FAQ page is too small. It might be nice to make it a little more friendly in tone too, less like a manual. Suggest the profile image doesn't have to be 50x50; let them upload anything under a certain declared number of bytes then you scale it and throw away the upload.
If you're not a founder, it can be surprisingly low. If you're the first and you're in at least a quasi-development role, I'd expect at least 1%.
How to effortlessly inject your content into Facebook, using Ning
Paul - predictions like yours appear regularly - each time it is something else that would Âkill MicrosoftÂ: pen-computing and OS/2 Warp in the early 90s, Netscape in the mid-90s, Client-Server and the network computer from Sun and Oracle in the late 90s, Linux and open-source in the early 2000s, and now Google and Apple. Clearly Microsoft has lots of challenges ahead but I suspect they have many smart people working to tackle them. ItÂs far from Âgame-overÂ, just like it was 17 years ago when there were far fewer Microsoft users on this planet..
Facebook Really is "That Company"
It seems to me that at least according to that article, it also depends on what you consider to be "exciting". If you consider Twitter exciting, OK - maybe I am too old to be excited by that (been there done that with the social networking, not that excited anymore). Targeting young people might work best for other young people. But what about startups that target old people? Newspapers are reporting about the aging of society all the time, but Web 2.0 doesn't really seem to account for it yet?

Personally, I would consider a startup targeting old people exciting, and maybe older founders would have an advantage there.
Axel Schreiner's book _Object Orientated Programming with ANSI C_ was published in 1994 and OO easily predates that by a good few years in the mainstream.

Schreiner is the German translation of Kernighan's books and this one is a nice example of using a preprocessor for C, written in awk, to gradually add OO to C so you can understand all the nuts and bolts under the hood of a "native" OO language. English translation PDF available for download. http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/index.html http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf
90% probably applies to the code, not features. I'd say, MS could have cut 10% of features and 90% of code.
Have a little cash... send an email to your favorite start-up and maybe you will become the chairman!
Evolving Excellence: The Lean Pantry (Amazon sells Groceries)
Facebook: Sponsored Feed Items, Irrelevant Ads, Still Tailored For Students
Restart: David Duffield 2.0 / PeopleSoft founder is back in business (This Time Web Based)
How to finance a startup: Angel/Seed investors, VC, Banking/Debt.
'... But what they don't have is any sort of discussion/feedback or anything else beyond getting the summary itself ...'

Amazon does this. It was the subject of that great book (Amazonia, Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut ~ http://tinyurl.com/364d9f ) and tells the story of Bezos hiring employee #55, 'James Marcus' as book editor asking him ... "how many 100 word reviews can you write in x minutes?" - The implication being he wanted to find ways to scale reviews beyond employees writing 100 word reviews.

".... why do computer users take time away from their own lives and work to help people around the world whom they don't even know? ..."

Now your 'stab' at this has a good chance of doing better, if you can solve the problem of why people write free documentation (supply) and allow the creation of something that people want to read (demand). The reviews at Amazon are 'ok' but lack follow-up. There's a great article I found on "Why Do People Write Free Documentation?" and some conclusions after asking a questionnaire that might answer some questions you have on this ~ http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/7062

As for the site, I like it. Signed up, got an account & checked a title, modified my bio. Pretty easy. Found the book I searched for ( http://tinyurl.com/34dsnb ) So if I write comments, add comments can I consume this data? Use it beyond going to a page? What I would like to see (more of) is

- choice of licenses (creative commons) to release any writing

- access to rss, atom feeds, collective & personal OR an API to query data

- access to stats on the books & reviews (titles, who wrote what, how many words)

All of which allow you to not only add to the site but add to the value of the data by consuming it in your own blogs, products etc.
First Real Web-Based Word Processor (why another word processor?)
Flash vs. Ajax (merits of platforms building 'Buzzword' wordprocessor)
OO is only an explicit design decision which can also be hidden in an implicit way of separating things which should be kept separated/dependent etc.

If you choose OO, you are automatically bound to the OO limitations (no matter how sophisticated this might be) of the designers of a certain kind of OO.

Already the fact that there exist so many different OO ways, shows clearly that OO is no really uniform, plain and straightforward concept. It is always designed with a certain kind of problems in mind, while in practice every problem has its own needs...

If flexibility is more important to you than some programming paradigm or scheme to follow, you certainly don't choose OO (if possible, depending on the language).
The title is from a talk by Rick Treitman according to O'Reilly ( http://tinyurl.com/3xopcz ) & the gushing reviews (no demos) flow. But I'll reserve opinion until it's in the field.
It's not the effort that counts, it's the effect.
"... the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago ..."

Looks like the early hires have lost that 'startupy' feel they used to get at google. Is it really that bad at google as an engineer?
I saw a Dane having sex with a mongrel
he said it was awesome, it was like nothing he had ever tried before. I told him "wait till you try a python"
Ideas seem to come in patterns. In some fields, good ideas come in patterns. For example, with biology:

1) I often see woodchucks walking along the breakdown lane of the highway, but very rarely do I see them run over. I bet there's something interesting going on there.

2) I put a terrarium in my freezer, and after a year a worm in the bottom was still alive. I bet there's something interesting going on there.

And so on.

It might be the case that entrepreneurship is a "weak patterned" field, i.e. that there are only patterns in bad ideas. For example:

1) No one wants to use my product.

2) My product costs more money than it makes.

3) There is no way of implementing my product.

4) It's like MySpace but for knitter's in Canada! (Going from general demographic to niche demographic)

5) It's like MySpace but with this cool new feature! (It's a feature, not a product)

6) It's like Google, but with a tag cloud! (Doesn't give a better answer to the user's questions)

And so on. Just looking through other people's bad ideas I think we can easily find 20 or 30 common patterns.

So even if it's not possible to teach what a good idea is, it certainly is possible to teach "the funnel method" of eliminating bad ideas.

And while there may be no patterns in good ideas, I think that, as you suggested, there are some very clear patterns in where good ideas come from.

Incidentally, I have this theory that most good business ideas start with "I have this theory..."
I am submitting my Social Search Site, again.
I am submitting my site again for your review/comments, as a lot of work has been done on the site since the last time I submitted the link to my site and I thought it deserved to be mentioned here again.
How can it be better, it seems to me that a module system would be a subset of an OO system? So logically it can't be better, if you are not forced to use all features of the system.
Potential Issues:

It said I was logged in as "Blogger!", but I have most certainly never seen your site before. So it seems your sessions/user/cookie/security system is broken.

Color scheme is violent.

The "about" page has completely different stylings.

When logged in, the "LOGIN" icon goes to "logout.php", you will likely need to dynamically rename it.

Whenever I select one of the "World/DE/FR/UK" settings it doesn't alter the search results, and the setting is forgotten when it loads the search page--forcing users to reset it continually is unpleasant.

You shouldn't be inlining your stylesheet, have a seperate CSS that you import.

There are several combined Scriptaculous/Prototype libraries that zip them together into one highly compressed file instead of two moderately large ones. Consider looking into that. (Further, you may want to consider doing this with only moo.fx, it is something like 3k instead of 150k, and load time for search results is not a trivial thing.)

The ajax displaying of the search results is very jerky, if you are expanding entries one by one, try expanding the entire division at once.. if you are already doing that, consider not using a visual effect on opening, just having it open responsively without the visual lag would be better (in my opinion).

Things I liked:

Access keys (have them more uniformly available)

The 10-20, 20-30 etc ranges you can click on to view results.

Ending question: why do I want to use your service instead of a Google / social bookmarking information cocktail?
Code Igniter is a pretty good framework for php. Much better than Cake as it doesn't sport so much "magic" behind the scenes.
I don't know about percentages, but I would bet that when I was in junior high, students who learned programming took it much more seriously than students who do today.
When the search suggestions pops up, it sometimes causes a scrollbar to be needed for the page, which makes the whole page shift by a few pixels. I could see this getting annoying for a user. There is an easy fix; add "body {overflow-y: scroll}" to the css.

Switching to different results pages (1-10 to 11-20, for example), the ajax is convenient but because you are contracting the old results and expanding the new ones at the same time. I would try doing one after the other (either expand the new results and then contract the old ones, or vice versa.)

The name sansj is not something that would stick in my memory, but I am curious to know what it means.

Bonus points for having Canada as a region, but I wonder why there is no US? Do you intend for "all world" to be mainly US?

The search results are a bit cluttered, you might want to think about what parts of the results are important to your users and stick the rest in a "more info" box (shown on mousover, perhaps) or something.

The results aren't quite as good as other search engines, but since it is community powered it should improve over time. A search for "blog hosting" revealed no relevant links in the "voted results", but most of the top 10 results were relevant. Did you build your own index, or do you use an API? If its your own index, I am impressed with the quality of results, considering you don't have the resources that the search giants do.
This is what students used to read in junior high/high school:

http://www.csbruce.com/~csbruce/cbm/transactor/
Knowledge of the learning process will help you through the stumble-bumble stage of new entrepreneurship
Depends on when you were in junior high school:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Computing
A Google Video feature request (or: how having a better API could have gotten them more content)
I submitted this post to news.yc because, even though it is phrased as a feature request to an established company, there is a lesson to be drawn for startups. If Google had made it easier for me to enter metadata in bulk, they would have gotten some valuable content and attracted more users.
Are any of you working on Flex/Apollo UI startups? I have to admit, the demo I saw of Flex/Apollo at the Salesforce developers conference was really impressive. However, my partner isn't convinced that going with a particular company's solution is the way to go, so we are sticking with javascript for our UI for now.
When I started as an entrepreneur, I asked a friend who lost his business what should I know. He only responded with "you'll find out, as you go". The exciting piece for me has been to discover the unknown. The challenging is the unfolding, --getting up and dusting off again and again. Nice entry, thanks. ;-D
Who wants lisp.tv?
I'd like to read: How to help start-ups get financed, --instead of telling the start-up about the money deal, tell them the exact experience in 12 steps of what hooking up looks like.
I'm confused the instant i view it. Is it about carnivals? The graphics/colors are so intense and disorienting i'm too distracted to type anything. My first response is another Google copycat interface, except now with a tag cloud. Tell me what using your search will do for me. ;-D
Interesting...

According this article, despite Facebook's open-to-developers
platform, its irrelevant / lacking demographics & preferences
(including specs of users' relationships to each other) are
preventing Facebook from serving the needs of a wider market.
sent the email.. let's see what unfolds. ;-D
IPO changes the culture from start-up to keep-it-up, the invested public expects growth and returns, oh.. but they most likely will will never use FaceBook to create growth. Hmmm greed.
The "intellectual curiosity" piece was written by a gentleman in Dubai, UAE.--not by a silicon valley type.
Could have, would have, should have.

Let's not even bother with stuffs that we don't know.

People made prediction of how screwed up Redmond is but in reality they're still shipping software plus showing other items like Surface, Photosynth, SeaDragon, DLR.

Not that all the stuffs counted as innovation, but the fact that those new items from Redmond are ready for production should show you how MS still active in the world of software.

Then again the people, who said "MS is screwed up, they should've done this and that", aren't working for MS. How could they know how bad MS screwed up?

The other people who worked for MS and said "MS is screwed up" are less than 100 headcounts compare to 60,000 MS employees. In a company, you cannot achieve 100% level of satisfaction. If you have 1000 headcounts, you have 1000 "wants".
Just marry an American. It's really that simple. :)

In all seriousness, if you _do_ marry an American, it is very likely that the US government/immigration service (now dba Dept. of Homeland Security) will forgive any extended but unauthorized stay in the US, AND give you a EAC (employment authorization card), followed immediately by a (SSN and) Green Card.

If you don't want to marry an American, you need to typically have some serious a) connections, b) money, c) credentials, and/or d) accomplishments under your belt.

In lieu of those, you need an attractive American employer who has one or more of the above-noted qualities. ;)

Please correct me if I am mistaken in any of these assertions...
wow...that was a quick response, thanks.
You are right about the different styling of the "about" page, this page is utilising TigerWiki and I didn't bother to modify it's style.As that page was mainly for informational purposes, I decided to deal with it later

I might have to clarify some of your observations:

One is automatically logged in as 'Blogger', to test the site out before deciding to signup.Once I have a few active users I am going to disable the 'Blogger' account.
"World/DE/FR/UK" should work now (turned out to be a cache problem, thanks for pointing out!)
I will have to modify the Sliding display a bit soon.
As for as your ending question goes, I built SansJ mainly for personal use. Basically, I built something that I wanted to use as there was nothing exactly similar to SansJ.Thanks to your comments, it is going to be better.
YouTube Mobile Launched - Here's The Scoop
There's always Academy X in San Francisco, and related courses/institutions around the world (especially the US):

http://www.academyx.com/training/san_francisco/programs/web-developer/

LAMP in 3 months for $2000. (Sounds about right to me?)

@Zak & @pg:
"For a non-hacker to judge the skill of a hacker is nearly impossible - it's hard enough for hackers to do it. PG discusses it at length: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html"

This isn't necessarily/always true. A person can always be judged by their prior work, as in any other field. The actual quality of the "hacking" may be difficult to discern, but the overall quality of the product/s should typically be visible rather easily/immediately.

If someone's built a product that works and/or sells reasonably, that's usually a good sign!!
"The way of the future...":

http://gigaom.com/2007/04/10/web-20-death-of-the-network-engineer/
kbeshay@gmail.com
Some more bits on MOO:

A mention by Niall Kennedy: http://www.niallkennedy.com/podcast/2007/03/moo-cards.html

Suw Charman's notes on Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski's presentation at FOWA 07: http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/02/22/fowa_07_richard_moross_stefan_magdalinski_how_we_turn_virtual_stuff_on_the_web_into_beautiful_things_in_the_real_world.php

FOWA's own page on Moross's appearance: http://www.futureofwebapps.com/pastevents.html, giving http://media.libsyn.com/media/carsonsystems/Richard_Moross_and_Stefan_Magdalinski.mp3 or http://www.futureofwebapps.com/presentations/richard_moross.pdf
I have added your CSS fix, thanks for your tip.
I would have to do some changes to the results Slider and the overall results display.
SansJ: Sans-Junk (that's the idea :))
Most of the search results come from a search API (that's why the index is pretty decent), did not think of adding US until you mentioned it!
You are right about "Voted Results" getting better as more people start using the site.I intentionally decided not to tweak the search algorithm as that would be contrary to the idea of Social Search in my view. I did to try to experiment on this page :http://trk7.com/ask/mysearch3.php?sstring=blog+hosting&submit=&co=all , check it out, one can move the slider to left to display less reults that are more relevant.
I can see how MS is screwed up from the pieces of their code that are open, which can be extrapolated to the pieces of code that are closed.

Unfortunately Adobe follows their path now, and even trying to beat MS in producing bloated code. Photoshop, Dreamweaver and even Acrobat Reader will soon become unmaintainable monsters. Otherwise, how can one explain that a dozen of unimpressive new features in the new version makes the package twice as bigger?
This is something that worries me too, from my research only Y Combinator can help if the need arises.
The slider is really useful and cool (I like the effects as well), I did not see it the first time around. You might want to add a description of some sort so that people don't miss it or get confused about what it does.
Shredder Chess engine goes remote: play via AJAX; chess engine runs on a server
Comment #5 on that page is absolutely hilarious and so true...
Who wants an itunes ftp gateway?
The software would allow for continuous and automatic itunes backup to your ftp server.
Do we need another photo sharing app?
What's missing in the current crops of products?
Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer
Let customers know exactly why they need your business.
No need. Your music is stored on your hard drive. So all you need is a daemon that synchronizes your music directory with your remote server. Hmm, remote synchronization. Maybe we could call it rsync, for short.
Fast Talk: The Blogosphere's Kingmaker
rsync won't allow for itunes metadata changes like play count, ratings, etc.

Of course, target market is for people that don't want to bother with scripts.
right, I'm mostly looking to gain mid level of proficiency in some of the front end areas to be a more well rounded leader.
While there is a lot of stuff I do not really want to learn, having the skills to create live mockups and make tweaks on my own will save a ton of time as well as give me more control of the final look/feel/function of the product.
Has anyone taken a course from O'Rielly Univ:
http://oreillyschool.com/?CMP=ILC-KW1330595132&ATT=learningjune
I'm a sucker for voting these kinds of things up. When I think about the work I pour into my own sites... that's what this is all about, right? To me this group is valuable, in part, because I don't have people I'm working with, so I think it's fair to give a hand to others in the same boat.

About this site: I get (justly) accused of doing engineer-style-UI's with my sites, so I know it when I see it. It needs a smoother look. It also needs a good tagline or something that gives me a better idea what it does and why I should use it after glancing at the front page.

"Search" is a pretty huge category for a small company to be tackling. One suggestion given in Crossing the Chasm ( http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/14/crossing-the-chasm ) is to go after a niche that you can dominate. I don't know what that might be for you or for search results in general...
I am looking into using Flex for my next webapp
It seems more to indicate that eBay's marketing department should be fired. Come on, who really clicked those ads anyway?
Microsoft is far less interested in trimming the fat and far more interested in making sure that any feature an enterprise client could ask for is included. For Microsoft, software's a business.
I won't knock FB for the advertising upside. But those 100k won't really be users of the service, which is what you really want for something so community-centric.
Carnivals...the last thing on my mind while coding the site ;)...I personally, got used to the colors and kinda started liking it.The color and style could be changed with little effort and it will.What is interesting about the site is, I have been noticing some traffic from Google and most of the results are in the front page.
eg:(look for trk7.com/ask/)
http://www.google.com/search?q=online+quick+and+easy+image+resizer&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=dialup+troubleshoot&hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&start=30&sa=N

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=lucene+with+php&btnG=Search

Although, not ground-breaking, if used correctly, this kind of search site can actually enhance search results in Search Engines like Google.