skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google the new Microsoft? I don't think you can make the apples-apples analogy.

Google can't lock out or force it's products onto its users, they're in a very different business and environment. In order to continue grow they'll have to innovate - users can easily switch to other services by a click of the button.

As for Facebook being the new Google, Google reinvented a business, internet advertising. Facebook has a great product, but they haven't shown that they can monetize the way Google did to search.
Also, take a look at www.odesk.com.
What kinds of business models do you think will develop around OLPC?

Business models other than the obvious, becoming a third world dictator, ordering a million laptops and selling them back to the first world for $250.

Equatorial Guinea is probably the best country in the world to take over, you couldn't do any worse than the guy in charge right now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_Guinea
Masuga Design -- Unobtrusive AJAX Star Rating Bar
Great geek documentaries for a Saturday evening
The Triumph of the Nerds
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398/

Revolution OS
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0308808/

Startup.com
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
Writing my ideas down helps them stop nagging me, allowing me to focus on what I rationally think is the most viable.

You don't think this is the right approach?
Thanks for the information....
It would be so great if I could find a book that details the differences between the different countries....

The only reason I was considering incorporating in the us is because the cheap credit card handlers like paysimple or google checkout only work with us companies... But I guess taxes would probably offset the savings...

Now I really need to find a book on this...
Feature Bloat vs Business Bloat
...until of course you notice that a baseball game being played in April has more votes than a hockey playoff game.

Being that personal bias (as I just demonstrated) plays a huge role in my sports viewing, why would I care what other people think are good games?
Now all we need is one for Facebook's paying users.
That's what he's saying... he'll take the bet.
PDF: Living Wages and the San Francisco Economy: The Benefits and the Costs
I've used rentacoder and almost every other online outsourcing company as a coder as well as an employer for over five years. My personal experience has been that it if you don't know your way around technically, there is good chances you will be taken rounds by most coders--or have a torturous time explaining your needs to the coder.

I continue to use rentacoder etc. extensively. Yet best way I can put it is that most coders on such sites cannot be replaced with technical knowledge on your end. The good coders are great for getting x, y, z coded according to detailed specs but very hard in planning those x, y, z.
Researchers: Scrap the Internet and Start Over
From my understanding, as long as the what is sold is immaterial (e.g., membership, software) and doesn't need to be sent to a specific address, you don't need to register as doing business in the country where the good is sold.

So in this case, I think that he might not need to register for doing business in japan if he's not selling any tangible thing...

I'm not so sure though since I don't know how it is in japan.
Get 411/local search, stock quotes, weather, news, book review on your mobile
hi everyone,
We just launched our new startup service for mobile - maufait (meaning well informed through mobile). We are currently offering 411 searches,weather, stock quotes and moview showtimes. Its compatible with most Java enabled midp 2 phones. Its free. Would like some feedback on the service
Now this is exactly the kind of criticism we like to see.
Thanks so much for your comments, bootload. Thanks for the compliments on the parts you liked. We're with you on the blogging - it's a big part of writewith, but we're making a tool that's useful any time you're working on something with other people.

The stuff you found underwhelming is mostly near the top of our to-do list, but hearing what people want definitely helps us prioritize.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean about privacy details. We actually do let you delete your documents, if you go to the home page, and nobody can see what's happening in a document unless you invite them in. If there are other privacy features you want, we'd love to hear about it (get us at honchos@writewith.com)

Oh, and we do try to extract titles, but we might be missing some. If you're comfortable sending us a document where that didn't work, we'll take a look.
I'd like to say something that u don't have to answer. In fact, I wouldn't like u to answer for it's pointless to argue with you, as far as I can see. But I'm just wondering: Are you as afraid of communism as to act as someone like Hitler would do? Your way of refusing to friendly discuss arguments is as intolerant and shortsighted as Hitler or Stalin would do. So, as you call yourself an anti-communist you just let me one person to compare you with...

I'm not a philosopher nor a politician but the way you talk answers one of the unsolved questions I asked myself while reading some historical books: are there still people like that?????

And there you are.....
Documentaries for geeks or about geeks? The ones about geeks will probably be really boring. They'll leave out both the technical stuff and the potentially actionable war stories. "Revolution OS", for instance, was a well-crafted film, but pretty dull if you read Slashdot.

Branch out a bit. Off the top of my head:

"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out": Richard Feynman talks. (Danny Hillis pops up for a bit.)

"The Fog of War": a smart, reflective person discusses how he presided over a huge disaster.

"Lost in La Mancha": Terry Gilliam takes a bunch of risks to get a movie started and doesn't make it.

"Around Cape Horn": Captain Irving Johnson describes sailing around the Horn on one of the last windjammers.

"Walking with Dinosaurs": Woo! Dinosaurs!

"Apollo 13" is not an actual documentary, of course, but it's fun and reasonably faithful for a big-budget movie.
Upgrayedd, two Ds for a Double Dose of intrusive marketing?
A good place to start this is things you're personally dissatisfied with. Develop a healthy sense of annoyance with the things you use. Start to look for things thought you ought to find really annoying but don't because you've gotten used to them.

I've found it surprising how much this can be honed like any other skill. At first thinking up ideas seems difficult, then suddenly you've got a queue of things you want to build because you're annoyed. Then you go through the queue for things that other people are likely to be dissatisfied with as well.

Hopefully once you're at that point you're better equipped to spot broken stuff that you don't necessarily use (or even want to use). My guess is that not being put up their own online store was not a pain point for Paul and Robert but years of building whatever tools like lacked helped them spot it as a problem others were having.
1) Collect your ideas.

2) Ask: "which one addresses the most user pain?"

3) Do that one.

4) Put the leftover ideas in a "maybe later" pile.

5) To maintain focus, any new ideas that come along should also go into the "maybe later" pile.

6) Profit! ;)
Edreams - it tracks the rise and fall of KOZMO.COM, honestly a great great movie, you can even watch it online for free at cinemanow.

Definitely check this one out.
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour?
Seth Godin's take:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/04/id_ignore_him_t.html
1) Scratch your own itch
2) Think of a way to replace existing products or services with web technology.

Good luck!
I write them down and only a few keep nagging me. The others are frequently good ideas I'm just not excited enough about.
Pirates of Silicon Valley ofcourse :)
Funny, on the other hand I have to say it seems very unprofessional by 3signals to publish their business communications online for the world to laugh at. I know they are considered the creme de la creme, but does this make me want to ever communicate with them, like apply for a job? Who knows, I might make a spelling mistake and they would go on and humiliate me in public. No thanks.
Somewhere I have read that entrepreneurs move to cheap areas to start their startup (maybe it was in the bootstrapping bible, see my submissions, but I am not sure) - apparently that is what Amazon did. Anyway, if you are living in such a cheap area, then you don't need the 15000$, or at least, the equivalent for you would be much less money. I suspect the 15K YC give you are probably spent on the 3 months living in Boston they require you to do.

How much do houses cost where you live, btw? I don't think people would be "gambling away their houses" by giving you 15K - wouldn't that just be two or three years more of paying off the mortgage?
yeah... php's lack of a mb charset friendly wordwrap function is a bit lame... the only quote i haven't been able to validate is the GitS 2 Innocence quote, anyone else run into that problem?
Isn't this sort of hyocritical when comcasts internet properties are all flash and involve streaming video. I think they have a part to play too!
$50,000 Spock Entity Resolution Challenge
The problem is the take down request system is flawed. Theres no easy way of verifying if the takedown is coming from the copyright owner and if you do delay acting on the notice and request the sender prove that they own the material then you become liable for the infringement. [IANAL of course]
But at what odds? :)

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-time-and-why-id.html
Project Aardvark? (I haven't seen this since I'm outside the US but it looks good)
"Definitely" is a strong word. Monetizing this isn't the hard part -- being an important part of people's lives is.
Social Network always makes people think your trying to build a new MySpace. Can anyone suggest an alternative term to use when your site is social but a bit more niche or just has some social features?
Any BBC Horizon documentary, esp The Great Robot Race one.
The 7 Qs of Great Viral Content
Check this excellent book by Kevin O'Connor, the founder of DoubleClick. He explains his own process for finding ideas and the mistakes that a lot of people do when choosing their own ideas. It's an eye opener.

The Map of Innovation: Creating Something Out of Nothing.
http://www.amazon.com/Map-Innovation-Creating-Something-Nothing/dp/1400048311
'... I'm not sure I understand what you mean about privacy details. We actually do let you delete your documents ...'

Hi Phil.

I just tried a simple set of tasks of an old file that I had (open office) and worked on it as I would each week. I remember reading your article a while ago on how you started, so I'm not surprised its so polished. Re-reading the original parent article I missed the collaborative blogging bit.

So I took some time and tried some more stuff and it works fine. I wouldn't go overboard on the 'underwhelming bits' I mentioned (spelling - because real-time could hit you on the server & you could optomise. eg: Firefox 2 with spelling included on the textboxes). So what I found, was pretty factual for a single user working on a document.

'... I'm not sure I understand what you mean about privacy details ...'

The privacy deletion bit, I mentioned happened when I did a bit of a poke around in your licensing files [0]. It states you keep a copy but remove the viewing capability, but not remove the file. This could be a problem for users (it would for me) but I don't know.

'... but we're making a tool that's useful any time you're working on something with other people ...'

I didn't get to do this bit. I assume you differentiate the users additions to documents? Can 2 users work at the same time?

'... If there are other privacy features you want, we'd love to hear about it (get us at honchos@writewith.com) ...'

I'll add it to the todo list I have, can't promise ... gotta work on my product as well :) One thing I will add is, check flickr for the way they license their text/images (creative content).

Regs PR

Reference

[0] writewith, legal privacy, 'Your Preferences: ... If you close your Unimedia account, we will remove your name and other personally identifiable information from our publicly viewable data. Content posted by you may remain on Writewith.com ...' ~ I interpret this as you can keep a copy of content!

http://writewith.com/legal/privacy
Ok I'm registered. Downloading the 1.5G document set now. This is pretty interesting.
way to go matt. Did you say 1.5G? For those reading & who want a summary the problem is on 'entity resolution'.

'... A common problem that we face is that there are many people with the same name. Given that, how do we distinguish a document about Michael Jackson the singer from Michael Jackson the football player ...'
Yes, 1.5G. And that's just the small dataset to get you going! They really should used a Torrent for this thing. Right now I'm hoping my wireless keeps up with the download.
or offer a DVD burning service.
Do as I say, not as I did - How Ev fixed his mistakes from Odeo with Twitter
Dont forget:

- Forbin project ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project

- E-Money with Cringely ~ http://www.pbs.org/opb/electricmoney

- Nerds 2.0.1: with Cringely ~ http://www.pbs.org/opb/

- NerdTV: Cringely interviews ... ~ http://www.pbs.org/nerdtv/

- Doug Englebart Mother of all Demos ~ http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/doug_englebart_.html

- More Doug Englebart ~ http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8734787622017763097

SEEN

- Startup.com: 9/10: How things get all messed up b/w friends in startups, 'lets get to work'.

- Revolution OS: 8/10: Nerdy interviews with the GNU, Linux & Free software movement. Worth it to see Bruce Perens hair & Eric Raymonds 'we are your worst nightmare' speech to an MS exec in a lift.

- Pirates of Silicon Valley ~ 8/10: Very funny take on Gates, Woz & Jobs
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122

- The Triumph of the Nerds ~ 7.5/10: Cringley doing his stuff with web1.0 startups. Great to see Joe Kraus with Excite ~ http://www.pbs.org/nerds

- Apollo 13; 7/10: Brings back memories of my childhood & Apollo missions. Not long after I got this on DVD I got to see Jack Schmitt talk (last man on the moon). Best bit was on how they handled the complexity.

- The Fog of War ~ 7/10: Robert McNamara, how smart people can get fooled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War

- Walking with Dinosaurs: 7/10: Ok

- E-Dreams: 6.5/10: Dark, gritty and how did they get all that money?

- Project Aardvark ~ 6/10: Uneventful, nerdy guys building co-pilot ~ http://www.copilot.com/
Understand the unwritten term in the term sheet
Doug Englebart, Rebooted
You're right, network sockets should be part of the filesystem. Arnold Robbins, author of GNU awk, is a fan of Plan 9 which did this the right way. It was probably the motivation for him adding special files to awk, e.g. "/inet/tcp/0/localhost/17921".

$ nc -l -p 17921 &

[1] 31333

$ date | awk '{print NR, NF [greater than sign]"/inet/tcp/0/localhost/17921"}'

1 4

[1]+ Done nc -l -p 17921

$

http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawkinet/gawkinet.html has more examples. Perhaps there's a FUSE module which gives us a network sockets filesystem?

Cheers, Ralph.

P.S. It's annoying that posters should waste their time probing the mark-up's flaws. Is there a description of it anywhere, e.g. what characters vanish, or how to break lines?
Would be nice if PG could let us know when, if ever, it's going to be republished :)
LMAO. You haven't seen WPF, have you? Or, do you really know how things are inside Microsoft now?

And, btw, I'm pretty much in the younger half of the population(16), and I'd much rather work at Microsoft which allows you to blog and conducts events in countries outside the US than at Google where you aren't even allowed to say what the dominant color in the data center is...

P.S. You rock, but this one made me LMAO. Tell me it was a late April Fool's joke.
While you're at it, read all the other articles by Joel, too, if you haven't done so yet ;-)
Zimride Launches Carpooling Network for Facebook
I wish there was something like this two years ago when I posted in the rideshare section of craigslist offering a ride from nyc to Boston. If Zimride were around then I woul never have given that couple's massage sex therapist who's father passed away earlier that week and had to run away from stuff to nyc for a few days.

I can see them teaming up with zipcar for people who are going away/back home for the weekend and want to cut down on expenses. Fun stuff.
There are times when you want to keep things in your house. They're using amazon s3 so it's costing them $0.30 per download. Pennies compared to the 50k prize.
How would you build a human computer so that people can write possibly ambiguous code in high-level English and have it "execute" by others using common sense?
Consider for example writing a sorting algorithm in plain English and "executing" it on sample inputs using crowdsourcing.

If the algorithm is ambiguous, the people executing the code could use their common sense, vote on interpretations, and even get back to you if they are really stuck.

The execution would be done by hand, although some users who know how to program might write some code to help them out.

You could of course do this sort of thing at a very high-level of abstraction. Consider prototyping a word processor in this way for example.
I just watched Revolution OS. Really enjoyed it. Indeed it is somewhat of old news to many of us, but it is also nice to see the faces and personalities driving the GNU, Linux, and FOSS movement as a whole.
"After they paid back their angel investors, they had about a year's salary each"

Paid back?, what about the risk issue involved here, do founders have to expose their money (if they have) to launch the startup?, don't really understand
Paul Kedrosky: DoubleClick acquisition aimed at cutting off Microsoft's air supply
True but I'd really rather it be a bull than a bubble. It's the nature of bubbles to burst eventually.
Can LeapTag Capture The Magic Of StumbleUpon?
You can have an ultimate goal of acquisition without it being your business model.
This story is really making the rounds. It took me a few days to understand why it made me uncomfortable. I posted my thoughts yesterday.

http://rodfrey.wordpress.com/2007/04/14/8/
Start by explaining the niche and why users are going to go to the site to begin with. A networking site typically starts with almost zero nodes, so there has to be something to get the initial crowd there and buzzing.

MySpace started by being a place for bands to showcase their music. The social network grew around the music. It's similar to the way an Opera House is a place to stage a show, but eventually turns into a place for people to go on dates, meet people, and show off. People will sometimes show up and barely notice the performance. MySpace is probably more like a collection of bars than an Opera house.
You've probably already done this, but if not definitely take a look at the PG essay. Pretty solid stuff there.
http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
I'm sorry if you got the impression I wasn't spending lots of time on my startup. I am. I was explaining why, for some startups like mine, it wasn't a clear-cut decision whether to try to move to a startup hub, because it's arguable that the lower burn rate is better.
"How much do houses cost where you live, btw? I don't think people would be "gambling away their houses" by giving you 15K - wouldn't that just be two or three years more of paying off the mortgage?"

Yes, I admit I was being a bit melodramatic. :)

Houses around here cost anywhere from 30K (manufactured home and a building lot) up; site-built homes start in the 60s for a small two bedroom place. I don't personally know anyone who spent more than 150K for a house within 40 miles of here, but there are a lot of ads for subdivisions "starting in the 190s" and such, now. Property values have gone way up for newly built homes, but older homes haven't appreciated proportionately. As I mentioned above, we're paying a little over 50K for ours, but we had the land given to us by relatives.

This is all totally off-topic, I suppose. Perhaps I'll point at this thread when I start hiring to explain why I'm only offering 35K salary. ;)
This story can still be outdone though:

How long until someone writes a virus that mass sends takedowns?
Restricted Stock vs. Options
This is a good way to find a) people to hire, b) publicity, and c) solutions to tough problems. I have to assume they're doing it for the first two reasons, not so much the latter. My guess is that they've already got a good solution to this, given that it's integral to their business. Maybe they think they'll find a better solution out there, and if so it'd make sense to hire that person.
Here's the Reddit discussion link: http://programming.reddit.com/info/1hy27/comments

If we had Alex's social comment site we'd already have this linked in.
The Netflix Prize (to go along with the Spock Challenge)
This is developing news, and there are a few interesting consequences:

1. Microsoft's software is unmaintainable, without throwing titanic amounts of money at it. This means that if Microsoft experiences declining sales on its basic products (Windows, Office), the products themselves will disappear. In a decade, Wine may be all that is left of Windows.

2. The price of Windows is increasing, as the price of computers is plummeting. A $2000 computer with a $100 operating system works. A $500 computer with a $200 operating system doesn't. Windows should cost no more than $20 today. Microsoft's model is clearly unsustainable.

3. The biggest benefit from Microsoft alternatives isn't replacing Windows, the benefit is being able to do things that were never possible with Windows. Linux bootable CD/flash is a wonderful approach for single-purpose devices, which is what most of the world wants almost all computers to be.

I've been programming computers for 40 years now, and this is about the third major transition I've been through. It is by far the most fun.
Yes, but what you forget Paul backspace backspace backspace, Paul, is that Microsoft Vista has voice recognition. I don't think that google has voice recognition. At least in that respect, voice recognition will be very hard for all when based service to do. You'd really need a desktop application such as the built in each recognition in Microsoft Windows vista to catch up to the future of the Internet -- voice dictation. For example, this polls is written entirely in Microsoft backspace now delete that in speech recognition.
Important topic, but I think the writer could've explained things more clearly.

A 10 second google search found this, which I think does a much better job: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/block/2003-07-14-ym_x.htm
One of the best sources for me has been from contract work. For example, if someone is annoyed enough with the software they are currently using to pay me 10 grand to replace it, then there is a good chance that there is a market opportunity there.
What I Expected from YC and What I Got
Enjoyable read, Harj. When are you guys heading back to SF? I'm sure you're itching to get back to the big pond. :)
A small prize for a big problem. Is this problem (differentiating individuals) not what spock claims to be its core technology? If so, it is a mite worrying that they need to advertise for a solution.