skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that Netflix will be able to compete with the convenience of dropping off movies at a blockbuster store simply with a price cut. I'm a loyal Netflix customer and I walk past a BlockBuster 3 or 4 times a week with my Netflix envelopes in hand to take them back to the post office, which is another 3 or 4 blocks away.

This looks more like a case where a great idea has been taken over buy business people, who are now playing by old business rules. I'm not sure what it would take to compete in this field right now, but they need something more compelling then matching their competitors prices.

Their 'Watch Now' feature is great, although limited by the selection you can watch (although it is still in BETA) and I use to at least weekly while I am eating lunch or something else.

The real problem that they need to figure out is how to become more emotionally involved with their customers. How do they get back to the days when a subscriber would encourage all of their friends to join and saving $1 a month simply isn't enough.
> most people are utterly shocked to find how little they do in a day.

I disagree. I think most people know how much they're getting done. I think tools like this and over-complicated productivity "systems" are actually just another form of time waster. Simply set deadlines that don't allow for wasted time and then meet them.
Great article and it is actually making me rethink parts of the design of my own start-up, which would have lots of network value, but it needs some sort of personal value as well. Now that I have a language to wrap around the problem it will be easier.

In the beginning all sites don't have enough data to satisfy any users. That is part of the process of building the site and creating a user base, but in the end if you aren't using it, then why would anyone else?
Idea: make a network of ebays, with each one specializing in a certain category: cars, collectibles, etc. That way, a community forms around each ebay, and each community can develop its own quirks that make sense/are convenient for that particular ebay, have its own experts (perhaps with karma to differentiate those experts), etc.
edw, it seems to me that you are talking about being an IT solutions provider?

Because no consumer will pay the $10-20K or so it takes to develop a product prototype from an idea on paper. The customer wants to pay the $19.99 for a finished product - and then maybe not.
It sounds odd, but even when we were billing $150 per hour for Web work (through our agency with 100+ people on projects) the margins weren't that great.

I'm not making a big sales pitch for working with a consulting firm (I sold mine and will never go back). But I wanted to point out that the golden vision of consulting is tarnished at best.
Monthly fee? No thanks.
Technorati? Who in their right mind would want to buy Technorati? They are AltaVista (anyone here remembers AltaVista?) of blog search: millions of irrelevant hits coupled with lousy response times.

Moreover, Technorati is not even a blog search engine, they are an RSS search engine, there is a difference.
Um, what the heck is "Nu Bidnss"??? "New Biddings"? That story is hard to understand for non-native speakers...
The only thing that can save Netflix now is if they build a great way for people to rent videos by downloading them. It can be a software or a hardware solution. They were pioneers in their field when they started, and they need to be pioneers again now to survive.
Will This be the End of Online Advertising?
I'd love to see a lot more written about this and more sites analysed.

I'm guessing Reddit and Digg took off not such much because they are personally useful without other people there but because news is something that is constant, compelling, frequent, neverending and you could literally hang out there all day finding good information.

Where as sites that are attempting to do the cold start and involve something like reviews and recommendations on restaurants or other services that you only have need to look up occasionally would have a much harder time getting going without being personally useful in any way.

There seems to be a lot of sites attempting that these days. Anyone know some good tricks for overcoming this?
Yeah, there's a certain warmup time to working hard, and total time spent on it is proportional to how many times you try to work hard. So if you're in an environment where you're interrupted a lot, a brute-force way to be more productive is to work a lot of hours. I'm hoping RescueTime will get me to pay attention to how long it takes me to warm up to 100% effort and minimize it.
No, I don't think I work hard. Why else would I be here?
Wish it would run on something other than the proud platforms (mac & windoze)
At risk of heresy, SICP isn't all it is cracked up to be. It certainly isn't worth quitting your job over. Any author who feels the need to include that many footnotes is being extremely inconsiderate to the reader.

I barely remember anything from the book, other than the pointless factoid about MIT's first president dying while saying "bituminous coal."

A better approach would be to get the problem sets for the SICP class, and see how far you can get without actually reading the book. Then just read enough so that you can finish the problems. Maybe use javascript instead of scheme, so it isn't a complete practical waste.
You can buy just the box for 250, also if you read their site you can buy the box for $99 dollars + 2 year subscription, cancel the subscription, get your money back, and keep the box. It would be tempting as a BT box, but it doesn't have enough local storage and you don't want to torrent (directly) to network attached storage.
A brutal calculus indeed...but best to take notice of what has failed in every case.
They have disabled comments for a reason, I guess to avoid pointless flamewars. Just a thought - not everything might be as stupid as it seems at first sight. I agree that ebay is not as good as it could be, though.
Being an hourly consultant at the moment I will attest to the fact that it is much harder then it sounds at first. My only saving grace for being self-employed for the past 10 years is that my client like me and they tell their friends about me.

Having lost one large client at a most inopportune time, I can attest to the perils, but when you get the formula down you can make a decent living and still have time to live.

But the real fun is in creating something larger then yourself and it is almost impossible to do that completley on your own.
Never said that, just said that there is no social control or value in eBay.
Celebrity Deathmatch: Facebook vs. EC2
I'm wondering what the YC crowd thinks of Amazon's web services (S3 and EC2) as a means to handle Facebook traffic.

The pmarca blog entry about facebook intoned

"the Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements. Individual developers are going to have a very hard time taking advantage of it in useful ways."

Can EC2 and a considered strategy to distribute load across [Amazon's] servers mitigate this?

Are there other tools and services that scale with usage in this way?

Anyone have experience with them?
That doesn't do anything social. Just a tool for sellers. I am talking about the once in a few months seller here that is being neglected. Powersellers get all they want from eBay.
Well, I can imagine some differences. A powerseller wants the highest amount of profit, but someone who likes to sell his product asap to someone who is like able to pick it up TODAY has different needs.

I recently had some issues with eBay where I had to relist an item 3 times because of scammers. Why does your item disappear before the deal is DONE? Why not have ME decide when it is sold, and not the buyer?
Well, closing an option down completely for the sake of spam-control is never a good option I believe. One should work towards a solution, not abolishment.
Amen, you totally get what I meant with the article, Thank you.
Angry Mob Gathers Outside SF Datacenter
This is edgeio's buisness plan right there.
A Drunk Employee Killed All the Websites You Care About
Netflix's stock, Web site both go down
Thinking about this a little bit more I can think of perhaps 3 ways a social network site can make a start:

1. People use it for its personal value and network value is built as a side effect. (del.icio.us, youtube, google, flickr, amazon).

2. The idea is so compelling people directly contribute to the network value (reddit, digg, wikipedia).

3. You initially populate your site with so much data that its immediately useful.

What have I missed or gotten wrong?
365 Main outage causes aftershocks in Web world
Honesty is always best when it comes to guys that can make you cry one line of code at a time... :P
There's an automatic large body of ads because their default ad is the Amazon affiliate program. While there's not a lot of money to be made as an Amazon affiliate, there's useful information to be gained about a user's taste in media.
Blockbuster is a dinosaur. Big, ugly, moves slow. Look how many years it took them to copy the netflix model.

Netflix can still move faster. They need to add value beyond the movies themselves, and also give something more convenient (digital delivery) than even a blockbuster store. They can give better recommendations, have films blockbuster won't carry, etc.

But if they are going to compete on price only, they're screwed.
Don't Break The Chain
Some good advice that can apply to any aspiration
It works. I used to do something similar for going to the gym
The fact that it isn't obvious for somebody is strange. After all this is how old software works in 99% of the times: you have to write something of useful for individuals alone.

Web applications are now much more collaborative, and things like digg/reddit/... are useless without a community, but when possible it's much better to actually use the fact that individuals obtain advantages using the system in order to create part of the collaborative value.

As a side note, my feeling is that most of the time web applications that are useful for single individuals tend to be more solid in some way: to compete with gmail you have to design a great web mail, since gmail is already pretty good, and this is hard.

To compete with a site where the value is mostly in the community a competitor may attach you in different ways and it is much more a matter of fashion that technology.
News.YC bug: You can submit sites multiple times by putting spaces after the URL.
Dupe. Original discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36500
Dupe! Original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36501
you just blew my mind, dude
Savings. Way to go.
Your 404 Error Pages
Yeah, that's pretty good advice.
Great site, awesome idea!
That was a well thought and written out post.

However, I don't think those examples have the same power of network effects that ebay leverages. By powers, I mean that in the mathematical sense. For a network of N nodes, the examples above have some network effect of N^1.3 or N+log(N), but I think ebay is closer to N^2 or greater...

The only way around ebay will be to somehow go around the edges (aggregation?) or fight a long hard battle against them with a superior product. I do think someone can take them out, but it will not be easy.
yeah, how about giving a beta invite to everyone who signed up with a news.yc referrer?
OSCON, anyone?
Anyone else here at OSCON? I have a presentation at 16:30, wednesday, which is also the only full day I'm in town. Anyone care to meet up and chat? Email me at davidw .... at ..... dedasys.com
I think ed meant to try to solve a problem a customer has, because at least then, you know somebody else wants it.
"Don't you understand anything about commitment, about being a pro, about sticking with what you say you wanna be? You don't just do it when you feel good. You do it every day of your life. You do it when it hurts to do it, when it's the last thing in the world you wanna do. You do it because you're a professional." --Teddy Atlas

Said to Michael Moorer when he wanted to skip a day of road-work while training to fight Holyfield.
"?foo", "?bar", "&foo=bar", and "#fnord" too

Just don't submit dupes, problem solved. :)
I found it works for running. After you have a two month streak going, you really don't want to miss a day. You find you make the rest of your life fit around it.
You can do similar things to any such site by putting a question mark at the end of the url, which most servers ignore.

The point of recognizing urls is to avoid ordinary dupe submissions, not to prevent abuse.
Seinfeld kept telling the same jokes for years.
So how do you get a sample set that's not biased? What kind of benefit is there to the user in saying that the ad worked the way it should?
How to Compete with Google Search
Hmm.. Shortsighted of me! I apologise. I thought it was a problem for reddit and digg.. Guess not! You can kill these if you'd like, since they're just cluttering up the front page.. I'd delete them if I could.
Anyone installed this? The documentation seems sparse and if what I see on this website is all that is available, this is not quite the equivalent of Instant Rails. No Apache, MySQL, PhpMyAdmin, Management Interface, etc.

In other words, all of LAMP except for 'LAM'.

Can anyone confirm? I will try it on my XP box when I get the chance.
'New Business' I believe, which I assume expresses the idea of finding new contracts.

Not easy to understand.
Very rare. Client management often is a full time job in itself and can be very frustrating.

Before consulting I recommend finding at least one large client that can guarantee 20-30 hrs of work for at least 8 months. Then use the remaining time to work on other projects, develop relationships and especially target potential large clients.

Otherwise you may end up like me, with lots of good ideas and lots of credit card debt. Still, one learns by trying.
Lawsuit Seeks to Shut Down Facebook
"Now," the master spoke, "you understand the world of enterprise software development."
The Web's "Hardest to Parse" Article
So, how should one find clients?
How to survive: Take the idea that to be successful you have to "Make something people want." and apply it to consulting. (e.g. provide a service people want) If you want to optimize your per-hour take (since you are bound by your time if you work solo that is the only thing you can significantly maximize) keep on top of your skills and move with the market.
Pics of Web Company HQs in California - Digg, Facebook, OpenDNS..
This is a bit old, but I made an alternate feed that did this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419
And apparently every day, no less.

But seriously, of course he did. People want to hear the hits, not the stuff you thought of in the shower that morning. Nice work if you can get it, though.
Ebay is dependent on their fat revenue stream. Free (or very cheap) and "good enough" will beat them.

But I wonder if maybe market fragmentation and not a single competitor will beat them. The network value math above might be off. As ebay has grown the fraud and moron problems have become serious. The future may be in the direction of finer grained, more vetted communities. Sorta like usenet got ruined by morons and the discussions largely went to more private web forums.
I could see it. It's true that the math would be more accurate as a Sigma(autionGenreNodes^2) summed over each auctionGenre. So you could see a better import auto parts site, a better pez dispenser site, and a better clothing site crop up. It's more about consumer education at that point, since any one of those sites could add specialized features and services much better than ebay's generalized ones.
Opening credits roll for Facebook's colorful court hearing
Actually, his repertoire was pretty huge, he never worked blue, and he's among the most successful comics of all time (economically speaking). The last season of Seinfeld paid him (and his co-stars) $1 million per episode.

He's not my favorite comic (or even in the top ten), but I'll take productivity advice from Seinfeld any day, all day.
FOUR STARS, THE FIFTH STAR RAN ACROSS THE STREET.
loveit
You're vastly overrating the network effect, because you left out the considerable damping factor of scammers, criminals, and idiots. I DONT sell on eBay. I never do, because it takes me 10 hours+ just to sell something (re-list 5 times, eliminate 80 spam out of my inbox which is a laborious process, vainly try to notify ebay of a scammer and getting the FAQ thrown at me, get my hopes up 8 times only to be confronted with: Change in plans, please ship to nigeria... and then FINALLY I get a real sale going).

I bet there are more people like me. I currently make do with local services like marktplaats.nl which works better for me, but the ability to buy or sell niche materials isn't good. (the network effect applies to idiots/scammers/spammers so there aren't nearly as many).

In other words: There's this huge market that basically isn't being served.
Quick Q
Hey, I don't know much about computers but I'm interested in learning how to make great web pages, Web 2.0 Apps,and Facebook Apps. Right now, I have been brushing up on C++ and Pascal (languages I have previously learned). Basically what is the right progression for me to develop the skills for the aforementioned?
Y! releases YSlow for Firebug - Analyzes pages and tells you why they're slow
Django Master Class (presentation and notes from OSCON 2007)
"Why I quit" by Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas
Most of these places look like they have a great work environment. Getting a tour of these companies must have been an awesome experience.
How Much Stake Do You Feed An Angel (Investor)?
You know your startup will need outside financing - an angel on your shoulder who blesses you with cash. But you want to keep as much control of your company as possible. What do you do?
Did anybody find the download link?
If you can't see the .xpi link, you could try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5369 which is what the page links to anyway. More specifically, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/1783... (have Firebug installed first).
Internal Code Reuse Considered Dangerous (agree)
Thanks! What is an .xpi link, and why would I not see it?
Open Source Software Strategies for Venture-Funded Startups
Justin.TV To Film Itself Filming Itself
C++, Pascal will be of little help I'm afraid. Web developement can be broadly categoriesed into points as below, that you might want to learn.

Server side : PHP, JSP,ASP,Ruby.
Presentation/Client side scripting : HTML,CSS,Javascript
Backend: MySql, Oracle etc.

I suggest you to start a project and learn while you code, learning curve may be
high for you depending on the level of exp you have.
Google joins hands with Band of Angels
That sounds like a lot of hassle.
Manager Mathematics
A simple equation to see how much money is being wasted each day due to stoppers. And without havint into account the fact that these stoppers break the flow.
That is sweet. Typical -- google.com gets an A for everything. :-) The Stats tab showed me immediately the importance of an Expires header.
How to Check Your Website with Multiple Browsers on a Single Machine
Not a bad idea at all, I can see your logic in this. Better for every network to do one thing well and leverage some long tail action.
For anyone close to Providence, RI: Meetup @ AS220 Wed. July 25th
LicketyShip Now Making Speedy Deliveries All Over California
iPhone v. BlackBerry: Side By Side, Two Week Comparison
Legal startup has its eye on the iPhone bandwagon
A technology startup in Sugar Land is trying to boost the launch of its new software with a little of the hype left from the rollout of Apple's iPhone.
Pretty disheartening story to read. One of the greatest frustrations with open source is that it, like all other human enterprises, eventually becomes a matter of politics.

Reading the article it seems like the requirements of desktops and servers are sufficiently different to deserve separate kernels. It certainly wasn't worth his time to keep working with the kernel developers if they refused to fairly examine his contributions.
They're thinking of calling it "I am a Strange Loop"
It's an extension for Firefox, and other XUL applications too I think, and you shouldn't see it because the browser should detect it and do something with it?
This principle is why many Lisp hackers fail to make good web sites or applications. Lisp programming can lead to days and weeks of fun programming, so that you break the chain of doing less-fun but important programming. Sometimes the improvement users want most involves non-fun programming. You really have to push yourself to implement it instead of procrastinating by coding something more fun but less desired.
Web development requires small slices of dozens of skills. You need to be able to design web-pages (CSS, HTML, a personal design aesthetic). You need to be able to interface between your pages and your server (web frameworks ease the pain of this: Django (Python), Ruby On Rails (Ruby), Seaside (Squeak), Lift (Scala), and others in Scheme, Common Lisp, Java, etc). You (will probably) need to be able to add interactivity to your projects: javascript/ajax or Flash (or, theoretically, Silverlight). You will need to interact with databases to create persistent data (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite), or at least learn how to use an ORM (object-relational mapping, used to create a simpler interface to interact with databases without using Structured Query Language).

If you are seriously devoted to developing a web applications, I would consider trying Django. It is a full development stack (it will help you with templates for your html, views to populate the templates, an ORM to control your database, etc), and I found it more intuitive than Ruby-on-Rails.

However, given the wide number of skills involved in web programming, I would strongly consider focusing on one aspect and becoming proficient at that. Specializing means you can more quickly become an asset (to a team), but will also develop skills you would need to develop anyway to develop quality web applications.

Although many web applications seem stupidly simple, there is still a huge amount of time and effort being spent invisibly: testing for cross-browser compliance, designing and building a system that scales horizontally, designing your website to appeal to customers, setting up your production hosting, cleaning and escaping all incoming data to prevent various security exploits, creating a caching framework to avoid hitting your database if possible (slow), designing your overall system to perform quickly, and the list never ends: there is always something else.

This is the joy of web programming, and also the reason that it is hard to do well. Don't be discouraged, just realize that it isn't simple, and get to work. :)
It's new business. I was thinking about all the cool star wars action figure names and the spelling just kind of grew from there. I should have added the phoenetic version I suppose.
Lawsuit Seeks to Shut Down FaceBook A
From the corner office straight to the chiropractor (classy verizon T, by the way):

http://paulstamatiou.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/opendns_...

I guess that might be a holding pen for reporters, and not an office, though. Then check out this stupid car:

http://paulstamatiou.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/sf_carre...

How stupid is that? The King Tiger tank (69 Tons) produced 690 horsepower. That car (1.5 tons) produces 612 horsepower. What a waste. And your typical diesel locomotive might product 3000+ horsepower (about 5 times as much) while hauling millions of pounds. And it doesn't even compare to a real car for looks:

http://firsttraderegistry.com/forsale/9_06/65mustang2/1965%2...

We're so vain.
The user who doesn't like an ad benefits from thumbs down because the ad disappears and he's less likely to see similar ads in the future.

The user who likes an ad benefits from thumbs up because he's more likely to see similar ads in the future.