skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt it. After all, the people behind Y cominator would want the best ideas/teams to get funding and the fairest way to do that would be to take a look at all applications at the same point. So my guess is, they'll wait until the deadline passes, review all applications and then give out their responses.
He's a CEO. I'd be shocked if he didn't come to a presentation with PPT slides & Excel chart combination. :)

On a more serious note, I think the idea that PPT slides full of text are helpful is basically entrenched in corporate culture. I wish everyone used Lessig's approach.
Photos of 37signals HQ - (37signals)
I think the biggest reason to upgrade to a 2.0 type forum is to avoid losing your users to a new site that is 2.0. Specifically, I'm thinking of the migration of users from Slashdot to Digg/Reddit. In fact, the term "slashdotted" might take on new meaning if these popular 1.0 sites get displaced by new 2.0 sites.
_Problem Area 3: Mouse precision
...
Windows Vista scored a Mouse Precision Error Coefficient of 0.52, compared with 0.40 for Windows XP, and 0.08 (!) for Mac OS X_

Not even sure how to approach this in a critical way. It reminds me of the sort of made-up, seemingly-mathmatical, but ultimately befuddling stats that you sometimes here in infomercials for copper-wrist band arthritis cures.

The windows mouse pointer seems to work on a pixel-by-pixel basis, when moving slowly. Not sure what kind of precision they are after. And if there was some serious problem, then gamers, who 1) Rely upon precise mouse movements and 2) Have low transition costs, would have moved to Macs a long, long, long time ago.
Start-Up Fervor Shifts to Energy in Silicon Valley
No. We respond to everyone at the same time.
Wordpress Plugin Directory
viaweb.com
http://web.archive.org/web/19971022011842/www.viaweb.com/cgi-bin/master/EDITOR/cgi-bin/ownacct

the html forms submit to /x like YC.news do!
I found out about RTML at Viaweb. Would Arc have anything to do with it? Maybe inspired by it?

http://web.archive.org/web/19971022012152/www.viaweb.com/vw/rtml.html
100 Ways to Be a Better Entrepreneur
Social network ad spending greater than $2b by 2010?
Check out the new Wired.com
Building companies for the long haul (Index Ventures)
An honest Postmortem for Klipboardz.com
San Jose Mercury News - Microsoft CEO meets with Stanford students
Ballmer is amazing. He's a constant trash talker. I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish other than get a few laughs.
I'd really like to see more of these - postmortems for sites that didn't succeed. There's a big survivorship bias in the accounts you hear - nobody writes about their failures. We'd have a more accurate picture if we had more information about things that didn't work.

Come to think of it, I wrote a postmortem for FictionAlley a couple years ago that I ought to share...
Check this out:

John McArtyem (rtm@viaweb.com) is in charge of Viaweb's ordering system, hardware and security.

So this is Morris staying incognito!? ("Mac - RTM") Probably because of being in the PhD program at the same time?
PS3 for distributed computing
Postmortem - Fictionalley.org
Read (I think) "Beating the Averages". It's a domain-specific language built out of Common Lisp macros.

Edit: Sorry, the essay I was thinking of was "The Other Road Ahead".
Some background, since this was written for HP fandom members who already know what FictionAlley is...

FictionAlley.org is the leading Harry Potter fanfiction site on the net (a category that's larger than you might expect). It was small but growing when I first joined the staff, having about 2000 registered members and roughly 30-50 simultaneous users at any given time. Over the next 5 years, it grew to 100,000 registered users and 350-500 simultaneous sessions.

This postmortem's describing the project to replace the original upload system - which was basically built on hand-uploaded HTML files and off-the-shelf forum and directory software - with a more modern database system. This project wasn't really a failure per se: it's in production now, people use it, and FictionAlley's still getting 350 or so simultaneous users. However, it took much longer and was much more difficult than expected, and the final result has fewer features and more bugs than I'd like. I initially figured on 3 months to finish; it took 3 years.
Seth Godin launches new concept for online advertising
0.Finding a cool hacker co-founder will be a bit difficult too. We are all out here ;) But if you have one in mind, Go ahead. You don't need the YC money. Living in India is so much more cheaper, it's not like we need Health Insurance or anything. But you have to fly back to market it, Second round funding etc.

1.Very dicey.

2.No one really understands us, I have an appointment with the lawyer at the International Center at my University. I will post to news.yc about what I find out. Meanwhile, you can try to talk to your Univ. lawyers too.

3.Death.
Not sure why you're giving up. The fundamental problem with your website is that it has (by now) been done to death. You aren't going to get away from that particular problem with this:

_Its a new site that will allow you to keep all of your day to day information online, so you can access it anywhere._

Just some honest advice here, coz' I'd hate to see somebody spend months and months to do something so unspecific and, well, done-to-death.

Did you notice that news.yc became reasonably popular almost the second that it started? Well, Paul Graham has a built-in audience, and that's how it happened. reddit is popular for a similar reason: Both pg and Joel Spolsky gave it some promotion. So, you know, you can't expect a similar trajectory.
I dunno about that: "Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 hours" became popular within 48 hours after it was published, and I have no built-in audience. I posted it to the Haskell-cafe mailing list, someone else posted it to Reddit, and when I woke up the next morning it was on the front page of both Reddit and Delicious. It's now the top Google result for "haskell scheme" and on the front page of results for "haskell tutorial".

I think the secret to getting widespread publicity is to build something that people want and are eagerly awaiting. I wrote "Write yourself a Scheme..." because I'd seen complaint after complaint about how there were no Haskell tutorials that build a practical project or deal with IO, so I started with some practical IO in the first chapter. When the tutorial appeared, it merely fulfilled a niche that everyone wanted to be filled.

FictionAlley was the same way, though I wasn't around for its birth. Basically, everyone was complaining about how Fanfiction.net sucked and the servers were always down and they eliminated the forums and arbitrarily removed stories. So eventually, some of the leading members of the HP fandom said "Well, let's start our own site then." And since everyone was already dissatisfied with FF.net, it spread easily through word-of-mouth.
Maybe there's a whole category of apps to be built like this: they don't make money themselves, but they educate the creators and connect them to things that will make money (he mentioned three new opportunties).

Also, this shows an impressive ability for self-assessment; I'm curious to know whether he thinks we would have done better by quitting and jumping into it with both feet.
Idea two sounds like GMail/GCal's got it covered, you're just suggesting a different input mechanism. Not that it wouldn't be a good programming exercise, but... mynameishere has a point.

Your proposed dynamic input mechanism does, however, sound like the right granularity for IM/SMS. As in, an IM/SMS to your service with the contents "contact: Paul Graham pg@ycombinator.com" updates your address book. "money: 9.48 Quiznos" updates a ledger. "note: news.yc needs UTF-8 meta tag" sends a note. Twitter's taking off; a context-aware Twitter seems like a cool idea.

Just don't give it a name that implies Chester Cheetah should be skateboarding all over your site. Radical.
Two differences:

1. Your example is _extremely_ specific, and so will match up closely with the needs a particular (small) percentage of people. A news aggregator is very general. The whole reddit audience could shift to klipboardz tomorrow with little effect. That "little effect" is actually a bad thing. Little bad effect, but also little good effect.

2. Your example is a document, and not a service. In short: There are many, many more websites that make it to the top of reddit or digg, than there are reddits or diggs.
On S3 and EC2
I did submit that one as well. He's definitely worth paying attention to.
TechCrunch articles worth less to a startup than expected
It really might have helped if I had jumped into it completely but I really just couldn't make that move financially. I'm sure that it would have made a difference though because the need to eat is a great motivator for success.
There are definitely apps out there that let you handle email and calendars but I haven't found anything that just let's you jot down your thoughts and keep them updated. I've been sending myself email notes on gmail for quite awhile but it doesn't really work well. Everything just gets mashed together with your email and you can't go back and edit something so you have a million replys to every message. This app is more like Chandler... except it already works and you'll be able to use it in a few weeks as apposed to 2009.
Delete This - mispost
delete this, sorry, this is what happens when you have your share on Ycombinator link right above your tabs
Tips for Startup Companies
Michael Mandel and Chris Sacca @ Startup School '05
I think it's possible to succeed in one of two ways:

(1) come up with a radically new idea (e.g., human computation)

(2) apply existing ideas to a specific domain in a novel way

You will probably have a much easier time with (2), particularly as people are already familiar with those ideas (e.g., tagging, social networking, etc.).
Nice! What's FlickPuz? Some super-secret, take-over-the-world, YC startup I presume?

Whatever it is, you might consider registering FlickPuz.com before someone beats you to it :)
Though rare, it's also not unheard of for yc to fund single-person startups. I applied as a single founder, with the stipulation that I would find someone before the summer. It all worked out, but I'm also the kind of guy who gets along with most anybody.

This was replicated in at least one other yc startup I know.
Robert was so anti-publicity that he refused to let me list his name on the About page. As a compromise he let me list him under a pseudonym.

"The Bunster" was his girlfriend (now wife).
YouTube Users Sue Viacom back
We put a gratuitous cgi-bin in the urls to throw off potential competitors, so they wouldn't guess how our software worked. Not sure if any were even sophisticated enough to wonder about that, in retrospect.
Looks like it was designed by a billboard designer rather than a page designer.
There is some good editorial content that sites like TC have, but there are some nitpicks as with all these sites. news.yc should be all a casual reader needs for his fix of startup buzz.
I believe they'll review the applications at their own pace as the applications are coming in. The deadline just indicates the final date to get one in, not the start of the review.
I definitely won't be missing the article headlines, but they all look like ads to me at first glance.

The Idea Database is pretty cool, though. (http://www.springwise.com/ideas/)
Composing DSLs in Ruby
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/bugbear/how.html

The original white paper for the company, then called WebGen.

"We do not expect that the web will replace printed catalogs. We do expect that it will eventually account for a substantial fraction of catalog sales. The Internet, like the telephone and the print media, will be a valuable sales tool for those who know how to use it."
Death of desktop ? SXSW2007
Cracking pagerank
Do Pageviews Matter Anymore?
I like that they mention in Nielsen's comment "that many news sites force visitors to click multiple times to read longer stories in sections" and then they make you do that.
There's definitely got to be a market for a company with better data on the value of a given site to advertisers, you just have to figure out how to get the data.

What about some sort of third party google analytics that specifically targeted whatever metrics make advertising more profitable? If you could prove your metrics were worthwhile maybe you could convince sites to embed your stuff to get a good rating and you could sell ratings to whomever is selling or buying the ads. There's sort of a cart before the horse problem there. Ideas?
Socializr Launches (from Friendster founder) - Still a Mess
Ficlets -- Collaborative story telling startup
Google Acquired Trendalyzer
Google TechTalk: Closures for Java
Ask News.YC: What titles are you using in your startup?
What are most people calling themselves? We have three co-founders, one of whom runs the place.

Right now we're going with:

CEO, Co-Founder

Co-Founder

Co-Founder

I can't decide if I like this or not, but I've seen it in quite a few places.
We have yet to get any VC money and are going to be depending on S3 + EC2 for our startup. Our biggest reason is because we are going to have extremely spiky traffic (it is a website centered on hurricanes and tropical cyclones), so it is very appealing to be able to call N-dozen EC2 instances into action when the need comes (which for us is predictable) rather than have to have our own setup year-round.

We have considered going with a grid system from a different provider, but given our satisfaction with S3 and the free travel between S3 and EC2 instances, we are going to try Amazon all the way through.

My partner got our first EC2 image up and running just a day or two ago, and it was without much trouble largely thanks to the documentation and ironing-out that has been done by those that have already blazed the trail.
I think it works great. Everyone should always be prepared to wear multiple hats of course. It give you all a lot of flexibility when meeting and talking to other people / potential partners & affiliates / investors, etc.
That is great. I've been wondering about RTML lately. Could users run an RHTML page without having to republish their entire site? How interactive was the structure editor (the language environment)? Did it have an interactive toplevel? Was each page independent of all others, as far as executing RTML?

PG, RTM, TLB: any chance you could show us some of the Common Lisp code that implements RTML? I suppose code snippets of the internal implementation wouldn't go over with Yahoo's lawyers... I've read everything I can find (like this: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt) already; what I really want is to look at the code.
John McCarthy (discoverer of Lisp) + RTM = John McArtyem.
Is Pandora done with? Online radio seems doomed!
haha, maybe, you'll just have to wait and see ;-)
Entrepreneurs are largely born rather than made, research suggests.
Good advice when he sticks to things he knows. Inexplicably he throws in a 'here's a book I read, maybe it's OK' section. Excerpt: "...you need to [measure] achievement and make that measure available to the worker so that he or she can motivate himself (for a computer programmer in a software company, components of this measure might be 'number of bugs fixed, with extra points for the severe or tricky ones' and 'pages of documentation written...'

Good lord. Read what Joel Spolsky (and everyone else in the world, it seems) has written about the perfidity of measuring the "output" of knowledge workers with punchcard goals, not to mention the effect on morale of 'motivating' your workers like you would motivate a lab rat. Here's more: "...people don't do what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward."

There's even a Dilbert strip on the subject. Yikes.
How to Fund a Startup
The idea at the end sounds very similar to http://stikkit.com/. How will this be different?
We usually just use Co-founder, sometimes but rarely "CEO" and "Tech lead".

What do you write on your business cards?
Which startup buzzwords irritate you the most? I don't like "passionate".
List of acquisitions by Yahoo since 1997
List of acquisitions by Google since 2001
This is probably a very incomplete list. I've heard they've been buying several per month. Most are so small they don't have to disclose them.
Link broken due to index website using frames. Could you edit with direct link to sunday times please?

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article1496283.ece
yes... very clever nerdy english show. Still waiting on series 2, "after the party" :)
Startup 101 : Should You Form An Inc. or LLC?
Social - you can tag people as friends? Wow.

Web2.0 - lots of reflections, gradients, domains wthout vowels, full of needless JS?

Ajax - as if people care what flavor of insulation a new house has.

"beta" = "our stuff is crap so beta in our logo makes it ok"
Web 2.0 has to be it. But you know what tips me off even more? Web 3.0! gosh
Web 2.0 isn't that bad. Its an awful name but it makes talking about the current state of web apps so much easier, rather than constantly saying tagging/social/web/rounded corners/ror you can just go web 2.0.

I do agree that web 3.0 is an awful name. My current pet peeve is the missuse of 'community'.

"Community: We have more than 1 user!"
'... if you're working on anything else you're not giving 100%" attitude seems very short sighted. ...'

Non core creativity kills startups quicker than lack of focus. Why? Because the core product will be making the money not a creative side product. Lack of focus on the problem kills your ability to make money. Look at from the business point of view (yuck, but thats what will allow future creativity).

Remember we are talking startups here, not established businesses. You simply do not have the time or resources. Now in the longer term you are correct. But make sure you understand each startup is in a fight for survival and it requires a very different mindset.
A New Site That Discover And Collaborate Over News
Thank you for the latest update :)
Do incentives build robustness in BitTorrent? Actually, no. [pdf]
Thanks for the latest update, all the little interface tweaks and polish are wonderful.

A quick feature request:
A 'liked' submissions link on users own profile. Would give a list of previous stories that you have upvoted.

Also I've heard a few people say they want search the past few days. I'd love to see it too but it looks like it would take more effort than the value it would generate currently
I agree. I'm real into the fact that I can see if people responded to any comments I've said without trying to find the post again.
Why just a screenshot instead of a link to the site?
My biz cards to come will read:
ceo / co-founder

My partner:
chief technology officer / co-founder

-Zaid
It's a pretty scary new model. Something tells me this is more of a negotiation tactic than a practical law.
This is TOTAL bull! Just curious: are you being paid by PPP?

While DEPENDING on TC coverage for the success of your start-up is a bad plan, I can vouch that TC coverage 4 days after launch put us AT LEAST three months ahead of our ambitious growth plans.

SOLELY a result of TC coverage did those bizdev emails start coming in from folks very high up at mainstream corporations.
Pretty much anything that this generates: http://emptybottle.org/bullshit/
Would you recommend a similar tactic now?
You can read my take on this specific post here:
http://www.zaid360.com/?p=67

I can understand you may want to become the next Arrington by the nature of your blog. But please don't do it at the expense of obvious bad advise at a place entrepreneurs hang out.

-Zaid
To be honest, ever since our launch, asking folks how much they know about web2.0 gives a good sense of what kind of match they may be.

Web2.0 sure has a lot of hype attached to it. But that discounts a lot of the TRUE web2.0 philosophies such as simplicity which while not ingenious have sure become mainstream AMONGST the web2.0 crowd.

I've found if a designer can give me a real web2.0 talk for 10mins about the trends and his experience, he has that much more chance of being of help to us and fitting our culture. Now, is that bad? No.
I suggest to anyone who has just discovered Markus Frind's blog to take (even a casual) look at his archives. I find his writing to be insightful and candid.
Whats this crazy thing you are working on jamie? Give us a look :)
I've given myself the title Executive Coffee Drinker, and my partner is the CIO - Chief Idea Officer.

As for co-founder - I think it sounds a bit weak. Even if there are more than one founder, they can all be called Founder. Vice President's of other companies aren't called Co-Vice Presidents.
Doing better than Digg
I totally agree. The RIAA wants a bigger cut of the internet radio market and don't want to become extinct. I mean it's not going to kill the established ones who can pay it like Pandora or Last.fm. But it will really make the barriers of entry very difficult for new startups trying to take advantage of internet radio. I'd make a guess that the RIAA falls apart in the next 5 years overall all this bs.
soon enough, be patient :D
Art Rhyno's science project
You're taking rules too literally:)

Co-founder is a well accepted and used title. And like you say, co-vice presidents isn't and thus one is used and the other isn't.
'... lack of graphics, change, and heavy UI development ...'

this is also a cheapskate way of concentrating on the development & lowering costs. Such cutting edge (performance wise) technology reminds me of the Mercedes Benz silver cars ~ http://tinyurl.com/2ufx36 ~ so called because they stripped back the paint to save pounds to enter Le Mons. In this case stripping back graphics to allow good scaling.

Thanks for the link.
especially check out the repl on the demos tab. very cool.
I don't know if you can say Digg is after the "Geek Culture" demographic anymore (as per the chart in the post). It seems to me to be a centralized replacement for the kind of people who would constantly forward emails to everyone in their contact list. Ok- it still has a 30% geek content.
Suggest you remove "CEO" from your title.

Having that word in your title has one, and only one, positive effect  your co founders are agreeing that you are the leader - and that increases your teams efficiency in the race to develop your prototype.

But the negatives are far too many.

When investors think of the word CEO, what typically comes to their mind is a person experienced in taking companies from the startup stage to the exit stage. Furthermore, a having a CEO position filled indicates to them that a significant funding round is in place.

If you are thinking that by giving yourself that title today you are positioning yourself for being the CEO post-funding, that is a false assumption. What is more likely is that at some stage in the companys evolution, an outsider will be better suited to take the company to the next level.

Of course, there are many, many exceptions such as Dell, Bezos, etc. But rather than claim the CEO title at the onset, and subject yourself and future CEO candidates to unnecessary discomfort (we are seeking a CEO versus we are seeking to replace our CEO), let your funding stockholders make that decision.

Whats most important is that your baby gets fundedavoid all barriers to that critical event.