skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sure they got decent paychecks out of it, but I doubt it was "fuck you" money. They're still going to have to start another business or work for someone else in a scenario where making money will still be important. If I was really passionate about an idea and Google bought it just to let it stagnate, I'd be pissed. If someone is going to buy something that I've put my heart into, they're going to have to either pay me enough that I'll never have to worry about money again, or ensure that I'll get to see my vision through. The Dodgeball guys didn't get either of those.

For an example of a situation that I'd like to be in, look at Thawte. By selling it, Mark Shuttleworth got enough money that he could do things he was passionate about but might not be profitable in the near future, like paying people to write open source software. For me, it would be investing my time and money in the education of others to make sure more people could reach their full potential.

So if someone swindled me out of a business I wanted to see actually change the world in exchange for a couple of million dollars and the expectation that I'd be able to keep developing that business, I'd be pissed. It just puts you in a middle zone where you don't have to worry about money that much, but you still can't do whatever you want. That's lame.
doh, thx. In all the time I've been reading this has alluded me. Should have guessed a compressed title ... [some time later] ... double doh! it's in the menu.
Presumably one would be smart enough to pull the ripcord as soon as possible. Don't wait for that 50m valuation, get out at 5m and take home a modest house instead of a yacht and a summer home in the Hamptons.
Looks to me like they got FU money from Google and then said FU to Google.

If they really are so passionate about this grand vision why couldn't they push it through Google? Then they give up and start doing totally different things. Doesn't seem like the dogged determination of visionaries to me.

I suspect they realized how little incentive there is for them to bust their asses pushing the product through Google bureaucracy, and that no one was pulling for them, so they quit.
Dodgeball had an early lead and a decent idea. If they had written an (optional) java interface and really pushed the "no gps, but free" angle, I really think they would have had a strong hand to play.

As they are now, they seem to have been stagnant for a long time. When I was trying to enter the space against them I always assumed it was because they had a big play coming down the pipes, but I see now they just failed.

I also don't have a lot of sympathy for those guys, those two alone should have been enough to engineer the product they needed. From the outside looking in, it seems like they had more than enough time, and they wasted it being complacent.
news.yc leaders' average points per submission
I was curious:

danielha : 3.52

danw : 3.24

brett : 6.10

python_kiss : 4.24

mattculbreth : 5.34

sharpshoot : 7.06

jwecker : 3.88

staunch : 4.57

amichail : 2.30

Harj : 5.74

Alex3917 : 11.77

joshwa : 4.62

far33d : 4.84

nostrademons : 7.50

jamiequint : 7.26

Sam_Odio : 6.06

Elfan : 5.00

domp : 3.44

zaidf : 5.93

dfranke : 6.40

Readmore : 5.00

paul : 15.67

blader : 7.56

phil : 7.44

mattjaynes : 5.72

herdrick : 6.24

palish : 29.60

veritas : 4.08

bootload : 2.18

BioGeek : 10.06
the code:

require 'rubygems'

require 'active_support'

require 'net/http'

Net::HTTP.start('news.ycombinator.com', 80) do |http|

body = http.get('/leaders').body

users = body.scan(/user\?id=([^"]+)/)

users.each do |user|

body = http.get("/submitted?id=#{user}").body

points = body.scan(/(\d+) points?
by/).map(&:first).map(&:to_f)

puts "%-15s : %6.2f" % [user, points.sum / points.size]

end

end
Bug report: deleting a comment from a thread does not decrement that thread's comment count by one.
I'm really wishing I could figure out how to get <br>s into comments instead of just <p>s.
He says you can't build a company to sell it, but several of the founders in Founders at Work seemed explicitly or implicitly to be (successfully) building companies to sell them. I'm highly suspicious, particularly since it's coming from a VC to begin with.
Isn't this like trying to build a Space Shuttle by using the Hindenburg as the starting point?
I have no problem starting up the editor and going - but then again most of my projects are self-inflicted.
a good way to put chunks of code in comments. ideally some wrapper notation around the code that does all or some of the following for its contents:

-uses a monospaced font

-newlines get turned into <br> so that lines show up next to eachother

- < and > get html escaped

- extra spaces and tabs get turned into &nbsp;s to preserve indentation
3 YC Companies That Have Gained Some "Traction"
Very nice. You can definitely do better than "top karma" in determining who's contributing the highest quantity of quality qontent (the 3 Q's).

You forgot PG though, I guess he took himself off there -- he's averaging 8.34 per submission.
It's more like trying to explore an interesting and challenging topic with an extremely powerful and flexible tool. Good guess though.
this might have been easier using hpricot, rubyful soup, scrapi, scrupyt, or something like that.
Yeah. I started with a require 'hpricot' line and then took it out when I realized pg does not put any classes or other identifying attributes in his html. CSS selectors and XPaths with just html elements seem hard to read. "td td u a" does not look so hot to me. Regexs are pretty easy.
Ubuntu's 'feisty' spin on virtualization
Research In Motion use LEGO Machines to Test Blackberry
Great point, getting users is the tough part.
Pirates of Silicon Valley - Google Video

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7941901498664355924
They're done working for Google. What now?
You should add in comments as well I think. Remember there are karma points here for discussions, as opposed to Reddit's practice.
Should you burn the ships? (basically, go 100% startup or take baby steps?)
It looks to me like the submitted page lists at most 50 posts. Here's my script which shows the problem. I've hex-encoded it to get it through the posting system unbuggered.

python -c 'print "77676574202d714f202d20687474 703a2f2f6e6577732e79636f6d6269 6e61746f722e636f6d2f6c656164657273 207c0a74722027223e2720275c6e5c6e27207 c0a736564202d6e2027732f 5e757365723f69643d2f2f7027207c0a7 8617267732 02d726920776765 74202d714f202d20276874747 03a2f2f6e6577732e79636f6d62696e6 1746f722e636f6d2f 7375626d6 9747465643f69643d7b7d27 207c0a747220273e2720275c6e27207c0a736 564202d6e2027732f5e5c285b302d395d5b302d 395d2a5c2920706f696e74732 a206279202e2a3d 5c282e2a5c 292e242f5c32205c312f7 027207c0a61776b20277b635b243 15d2b2b3b20735b24315d 202b3d20243 27d0a20202020454e4420 7b666f7220286e20 696e206329 207072696e74 662022252d32 307320253564202 535642025372e32665c6e22 2c206e2c20635b6e 5d2c20735 b6e5d2c20735b6e5d2 02f20635b6e5d7d27207c0 a736f7274202 b336e720a".replace(" ", "").decode("hex"),'

Cheers, Ralph.
And the same code as hex-encoded above but with various missing characters, etc., introduced by the posting system.

wget -qO - http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders |

tr '"' '\n\n' |

sed -n 's/^user?id=//p' |

xargs -ri wget -qO - 'http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id={}' |

tr '' '\n' |

sed -n 's/^\([0-9][0-9]\) points by .=\(.\).$/\2 \1/p' |

awk '{c[$1]++; s[$1] += $2}
END {for (n in c) printf "%-20s %5d %5d %7.2f\n", n, c[n], s[n], s[n] / c[n]}' |

sort +3nr

Cheers, Ralph.
And what happens to the rankings when you filter out the top 10 domains being submitted?
Relative value of open source to open services
I somehow don't think that Microsoft are simply going to go away. When 95% of the worlds people use a Microsoft OS including big business with great application support and the ability to buy cheap hardware (which Apple cannot replicate) Microsoft will be dominant. And now they have a fairly decent OS which is comparable to OSX, it just isn't compelling enough to switch any more. At least for the people I know....
Hmm. It seems some italic text slipped in there. What other mark-up works? _Software Tools_ is an excellent book. The /leaning/ /tower/ of /Pisa/. Disappearing: lt= amp=& star= (becomes italic) question=? hash=#. Recognised: ralph@inputplus.co.uk http://google.com/ Breaking lines: abc\
def\
ghi.
Nope, how about abc\c
def\c
ghi.
abc \
def \
ghi?
bug. second last char "," should be removed for it to work
defiantly there needs to be some sort of markup. pasting code (especially python) ~ see guido there is an instance where python and whitespace fails.
If you mean the trailing comma to the print statement, that's intended and required to stop an extra ASCII LF in addition to the hex-encoded one being printed.

I did python -c '...' | cmp - orig to test it.

Cheers, Ralph.
Documentation on the mark-up allowed, e.g. italic, some way to post normal ASCII characters for code snippets, which in turn require line breaks.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13261
They are copying Netflix with this approach. However it makes much more sense for Netflix: prize is $1m, they are an established company, and recommendation system is important but not the core of what they do.

I will go ahead and download the corpus though - the problem is interesting and you can't easily find datasets like this.

Edit: Anyone care to post it as a torrent? I think posting a link here and in Reddit will be enough to get a good download speed. I wish someone posted a torrent for the Google N-grams corpus as well...
The HTML header's title should have more page context in it so the browser's Back menu isn't a list of identical titles making selection difficult.

Cheers, Ralph.
spock is worthless without other users on spock

From what I understand it crawls the internet to find people rather than getting people to submit information. This way it's useful even without other users on spock.
essentially yes.
DodgeBall founder quits Google
Hey Ralph. I tried it in a console just pasting the thing in. I'll try it again. ... cut + paste

...

Oh sorry. My fault cutting & pasting into idle :( but I did get a warning on sort sort: Warning: "+number" syntax is deprecated, please use "-k number"

...

Cool, worked. The titles are "user", "# of posts", "karma" & "karma/# of posts" ?
Bill Hewlett & Dave Packard (HP) - Early Years
We all start somewhere: "The first products weren't very romantic, I'll tell you. There was a shocking machine to enable you to lose weight; a clock drive for a telescope and a magic eye to turn on a urinal at Stanford."
"Paul Graham himself was completely written in lisp"
Capital Into Code
in a nutshell: cortez story of burning his ships is false; they were destroyed but not burned. sun tzu advises a "burn ship" strategy only in desperation. king leonidas and his army took on the great persian army to defend greek cities. bottom line, "burn ship" is for older, more experienced people, and youngsters should not be encouraged to do it.

very well. but when you are an experienced sage, you have probably built yourself a battleship. for one, it's fireproof. for two, it carries cannons and cruise missiles. for foot soldiers, it still makes sense.
Good post, only makes me think that the UK (my homeland) has a long way to go :(
I often think about the idea behind this article, "build a better mouse-trap", then compete with "37 others offering exactly the same service for free" OR use capital to hire smart hackers and build superior products.

This also relates to the Ben & Jerry OR Amazon model [0] because if you hire smart hackers you can grow organically [1] creating good products faster? Or so the article assumes.

This article was written in 2000. Does it still hold true? Can you make money using the Ben & Jerry model through hiring smart hackers? using the web based model? Not all companies are going to be bought out and selling desktop software is no longer as desirable as when this article was written.

Reference

[0] Joel Spolsky, 'Strategy Letter I, Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon, May 12, 2000'

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

[1] That is don't sell out and create a company using profit from sales instead of looking for a flip.
April 2007 Traffic Stats for Web 2.0's 25 Hottest Sites
I don't get the REST thing, does anybody have a better introduction to it? I can see how in principle it would be nice to be stateless, but how does one manage to create a complex web application like that?
(The office was finished early this year)

Here are some of the ideas I was working with specifically for making developer work spaces (This space is for a very fast growing but financially mature business - not a cash-strapped startup. My primary advice for a startup office space: buy DOORS for desks!. You can get doors at home depot for desks - hollow core nice wood without the door handles drilled out for just over $10 apiece. Put the doors on top of file cabinets, and voila, you have a nice looking desk at very low cost that can last for years if you like.):

From the hackers perspective:

+Each space had to have natural light and views, but be closable for privacy. The point here is to allow for staring into the distance when the subconscious is cranking on an idea, allow the space to be closed during moments of extreme focus, and to have the doors be a sign to others which mode the person is in at the time.

+Each space had to allow for a small conference of 2-3 people for easy and impromptu discussions.

+Each space had to have a lot of attention to detail and materials to make the spaces feel personal.

+There had to be a space for larger meeting outside of the formal business conference room. I turned the lunch-room into one of the key design spaces and put whiteboards all along one wall with data ports for easy discussions and to make having lunch more fun. (The company provides free lunch every day)

+The developer area had to be acoustically protected from the back office area, the customer relations area and the accounting area to avoid concentration disruptions.

+The space was in a classic old building with exposed wood beams and ceilings, so we used a raised floor system (with no sign to the user that it's raised) to have all the heating/cooling provided from the floor and allow for easy addition and movement of data and power ports.

+The server room was treated as a "jewel" with wall to wall glass for people (especially hackers) to appreciate the racks of technology at their fingertips. (Also, the servers had multiple power back up systems including generators, a fire suppression system that would not damage the equipment in case it was used, and its own cooling system to run at ideal temperatures with a lot of extra rack space to allow for easy growth.)

From Management's Perspective:

+The space had to be flexible to allow for reconfiguration and potentially moving out to another space in the future.
Is there a list of the programming languages and environments YC acceptees have used on their applications?
Here are some discussions:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=10748
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=10875
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12619
I wonder if the author knows he didn't write reddit.
very cool ideas here ~ must take some time to think about them.

'buy DOORS for desks'

the old cheapscate amazon office ~ http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks.html
He does, yes. The comments are good in this thing too, pretty funny.
Who needs monetization? In this day and age, eyeballs are everything.
Polarize Me - If you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you
"Why do these headlines suck so much? Fear. Fear of saying too much. Fear of saying something clever that someone might think is stupid. Fear of saying something revealing that might turn someone off. The headlines try desperately not to exclude anyone. In doing so, they succeed at boring everyone."

Reminds me of Kathy Sierra.
Nice link :) I guess my "door desk" is one step above Amazon as the filing cabinets look better (I use black ones that just happen to be exactly desk height) and don't cause injury on leg impact. They do cost more depending on how nice your file cabinets are. The alternative to filing cabinets are bolt on adjustable metal legs designed to hold doors - they cost about $15 apiece and look pretty good. http://www.closet-masters.com/Table_legs/Camar/slim_legs.asp

Another great door holder (maybe the best) is a bookshelf from office depot: http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=718201&Nr=200000&N=201641&An=browse

A good option: filing cabinet or shelves one side, legs the other.

I actually got the idea in 1989 when I was working for Paul Rudolph Architect in NYC. He was doing major high-rises all over SE Asia at the time and billing at $360+ per hour (staff of 7) but still worked on his door. He had designed a simple steel support structure that tilted the door for better drafting - analog drafting believe it or not. That was 1 year before I went from pencil drafting to Cad.
(10 unread) Yahoo! Mail Beta, matthew.wensing
There's nothing wrong with being lazy.
intentional double pun? pure brilliance.
Word of Mouth Is All About the Experience - People Want to Talk
i really liked the article, the show business and restaurant analogies were pretty interesting. Web2.0 has churned out so many "me-to" companies, so I think this is very sound advice for any software/web app that is thinking beyond the flip.
I was thinking the other day about why it was that so many of the smartest people work only a couple hours a day, which relates to the open door theory proposed in this speech. Joel Spolsky mentioned doing this in the article linked to from here yesterday, and I remember Chris Sacca saying that people really only did an hour or two of quality work every day at Google. My thinking was that the people we typically think of as smart are the people who are innovative and come up with new ideas. And new ideas tend to come from combining two or more fields. Which would give people who are a little bit ADD a huge advantage, though at the same time reducing the amount of actual work they are able to do on a day to day basis.
Lately the median co we fund uses RoR.
Usually in those cases your domain name might reappear in a few days, since there are some 5 day money back policies that the domain hogging companies take advantage of.
Is RoR favored due to its ability to allow for speed of development? As this must be a key factor for a company expected to produce a workable application in a 3 month time period.
$500 for incorporation is a very low figure for some states. If I remember right, the cost of incorporation as an LLC in Massachusetts (which is what I was researching at the time, because that's where I am) runs about $1000 between what you end up owing the state and what you end up owing the lawyer; incorporating as an LLC in any other state means you need to register as a foreign corporation with the state if you intend to do business in that state (in MA: lease property as a corporation, pay salaries as a corporation, own property as a corporation), which in Massachusetts runs about $1000 between what you end up owing the state and what you end up owing the lawyer.

Other states may be more lenient on when you need to register as a foreign corporation or cost less to incorporate or register as a foreign corporation. Also, for some startup models, it can make sense to incorporate in Delaware when you start development and then worry about the whole foreign-corporation thing when it's time to start hiring employees rather than adding partners.
Buying domains rarely works. The owners either never respond to you or want a crazy price. Plus there are always good ones still untaken.
The UI for the project I pitched to YC. It's one of the two hard interesting problems in the project, and it's the one that has the most effect on the success or failure of the project.

(There's another hard interesting problem, but it's the sort of thing that can be tweaked and tuned.)

I'm not working on it at this moment because I'm at my day job looking busy, and I don't want to do any concrete work on that project here because of IP issues. (Any work I do off company time is not theirs, and I have that in writing; any work I do on company time is theirs. One of the advantages of working for a very corporate boss is that "company time" is defined as 9 am to 5 pm.)

I'm not working on it in code right now in general because it's still percolating in my backbrain while I am picking off a few of the more straightforward problems to get myself going. And because it's big and scary, and code seems more permanent than sketches.
Good work ruining the punch line by putting it in the heading.
dupe? similar to http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13285 too
Hey, death threats aren't funny, and being afraid of a death threat is something very different from being afraid that taking a stance might hurt your bottom line.
No reason for that kind of tone, we're all friends here. Besides, picking your own titles is half the fun at this.
For those interested: Slashdot has a link to an article about the toll that people using this loophole have taken on the DNS system: http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/16/1515244.shtml
Looks more like an rss thief.
Yeah. I got lazy. The problem with comments is that many good ones only get 1 or 2 points so the average is less meaningful (not that there aren't all sorts of wacky aberrations in the submissions averages).
And closer to home: Is Google?
The page showing the comments of a user should only show each post once. At the moment, if I have a conversation, me1 - you1 - me2 - you2 - me3, then m3 appears first as the most recent, then later me2 downwards, then later still me1 downwards. It's redundant clutter. The only benefit of this arrangement is my most recent posts are first instead of the most recent chain of my posts. I'd prefer the latter.

Cheers, Ralph.
Hah, some of those other parts were much funnier.
Very true, she's had some effective illustrations of why you never want to be in the bland middle. For one thing, that's where all the big companies are, by necessity.
interesting, for people that picked up RoR as a tool for 'beating the average' (http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html) - RoR has become framework of choice for average startups..
I blogged this last night about how it pertains to what we're doing:
http://www.zaid360.com/?p=143
Marketing is More than Advertising. Get Better Results by Knowing the Difference
UStream feeds the web's narcissists
Nah, it's just because the lisp guys smell too bad to catch their flight to the interview.
news.YC Meetup: Future of Web Design, Wednesday 18th, London
Traffic seems to be a very poor metric for comparison in this case.
Sorry, I was referring to posts like this from Kathy:
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/10/dilbert_and_the.html
Is anyone else going to be at the Future of Web Design in London on Wednesday?

If anyone else is attending I'll be there all day and it would be great to meet any fellow news.YC'ers. You can find me either at the registration desk or in the speakers corner. If in doubt ask one of the Carson Systems folk to point me out.
One word: MySpace.
Oops -- sorry that I misunderstood so completely what you were saying! Thanks for the explanation :-)
Very complex topic that I don't think the author evaluated thoroughly enough.

This advice sounds applicable outside of this example case though.
Simple:

The cost of pursuing the idea outweigh the benefit, considering risk.

More directly: burn money, cost of leaving present occupation.
I don't think you can tell for sure until it succeeds. It's like the halting problem.
I didn't mean for my comment to have "that kind of tone", I was just busting your balls buddy.