skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am very much in favor of having a "top discussions" section. I tend to be more interested in active discussion than just popular submissions.
The parent addition is helpful, but to find the origin of discussion, one would have to keep following parent links. Having a link to the main discussion would be nice.
Yahoo Mixd Closes - Peanut Butter Manifesto in Action?
Neighborhood in shock as Paul Graham is accused of displaying flagrant homosexuality.
After hearing Fred Wilson talk I'd definitely say Union Square Ventures. At least your best east coast option, together with First Round.
Jeff Bezos once described John Doerr as the center of gravity in the Silicon Valley :)
I am a month past 29 and just got my first "real job" (previously I had started 2 businesses and joined a good friend in his business). A friend I met told me about Saturn's Return (google it) which is a f*cked up period of life that happens between 27.5 and 29.5 so hopefully Im on my way out.

BTW the "real job" means the 4th person in at a digital media startup. Older and Wiser.
Absolutely awesome turn-around, thanks!
I have done some work on code search that's different from krugle, google code search, etc.:

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=972749

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1007979

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=776816.776831

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1357819
Zawinski's law didn't really apply to windows either.

But it's a good question. Both edges of the feedback loop between search and social network are interesting:

a) Social networks where we have to manually link to friends will not last.

b) Google's integrating search with notebooks, groups, hosting, email and IM. Perhaps those are primitives for a social network rather than an OS.

c) Making search more relevant using a social network is perhaps still a valid approach, in spite of the lack of success so far.
Microsoft to blast Google for its copyright policy
I live on Maui and even though the Maui High Performance Computing Center is here plus the Haleakala Observatory- I've met only 3 or 4 geeks my whole time here, and no tech entrepreneurs. Of course, I can't complain. I mean, I live on Maui.
this article certainly provides v strong support for your view

http://www.imitrust.com/thepit/2007/01/25/sequoia-capital-the-entrepreneurs-entrepreneur/
Seems to me that we have a hole. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=29

Speaking of which, I do not entirely understand what a dead link is. I told it to show dead links, and links other than this one that were dead have been reasonable, so I'm confused. Normally, I think of dead links as ones that don't work anymore, but the dead ones here certainly do work.
And it's great too. As soon as I can see a list of my own comments it becomes relatively easy to check recent ones for responses, and automatic notification becomes less important. It's interesting how these features interact.
I'm 24 and not interested in being an assistant for my whole life. I spent time at some major labels which sounds cool but it really wasn't. It turned out to be a pretty frustrating and disheartening experience, but I learned a lot. After some time in NYC I just decided to come back to Massachusetts and really try and get my own ideas off the ground. My partner is 25 and rotting away at a repetitive flash development job. He's damn good at flash though haha
Not really, but feel free to drop by Stamps Landing (where Dabble DB and Snipshot have our offices) for a beer some time... email me first to set something up.
How Steve Jobs prepares for speeches
Have two primary objectives with your startups- to get them stable, solve the big/fun problems etc., and secondly to replace yourself. I know we're all irreplaceable, but the truth is a good businessman can find someone almost immediately to train and groom to take over whatever it is you're doing- releasing you to move onto the next thing. You'll have finished most of the creative stuff that needed you. Then you go back every 6 to 18 months when they have an exciting new problem and save their butts.
Irrelevant to the rest of the discussion, but just a suggestion: get the domain name octapart.com, too. Lots of people spell octopus wrong. Good luck! Sera
In short: prepare like your life depended on it.
RIAA could change the market for internet radio startups
Hmm interesting question. I suppose there is no need to restrict but I would say that as great as Woz is - would he really add more to your startup than an angel investing veteran like Ron Conway? Investing is as much about bringing a list of contacts to the table as it is about anything else.
I remember for so many years people abhorring javascript. For quite a while though it was the only language being commonly used that had first class functions where you could program in a functional way.

"'I thought JavaScript was just super-dumb Java'. Lots of programmers and web developers use Javascript this way, tweaking HTML DOM elements, declaring variables without types, and generally writing like it was BASIC for the web. Now we find that the C-style syntax and Java-like supporting libraries were hiding our friend, the lambda."

http://jfkbits.blogspot.com/2006_05_01_archive.html (near the bottom)

It's got nothing on Ruby, but you can still do some amazing things with it, IMO:

http://parenscript.org/

http://chumsley.org/jwacs/

Anyway, nice to have people seeing it for what it really is, even if it's no Arc :)
Who is your dream co-founder?
deVinci
I don't want to wear this theme thin but a comment on my dream investor thread made me think about this. If you could start a company with anyone in the world who would it be?

As a non-tech person I'd probably pick something who was strongly technical - most likely Steve Wozniak.
It's more about street cred than anything else. I want an investor who will make people think "if he's putting his money into this company, it's worth checking out". A knowledgable VC can bring me to other investors/acquirers. Someone like Woz could bring other investors to me.
Bruce Perens.
Steve Jobs has the midas touch. I would rather have him as the cofounder.
China has banned LiveJournal!
Web 2.0: Shifting from "Get Fast" to "Get Massive" this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Fitzpatrick
AddThis.com -- Saving 100 Million People 20 Minutes Each
I love this type of startup. It's the definition of doing "one thing well". I think there's room for thousands of "utility features" like this. No single company can possibly do more than a few of them well, which leaves a lot of room for the small development teams to pick one and own it.
Just happy to see fake email address in DB
Indeed. Although I'm sure by the time he's through with you, that "co" will be but a distant memory..
UnVenture Capital: An Alternative Approach to Startup Investing
How to assess a job offer from a startup
Be Passionate and Stay Committed
Re: startups as reimplemented UNIX commands -- Mark Fletcher fesses up
Joe Kraus calls vertical search "top down" entrepreneurship:

http://www.ikiw.org/2006/09/18/a-conversation-with-joe-kraus-co-founder-and-ceo-of-jotspot/

These guys appear to be scratching their own itch, so I think they have a shot at least.
There's a lot of industry veterans that I would love to work with.

But as far as a co-founder goes, I'm happy with my current one. We have a great working relationship and we're good friends -- plus our skills compliment each other.
$100 Million Valuation For Geni
I give this a whirl when they launched. I wasn't too intrigued from the get-go. But I started adding my immediate family tree and, days later, I noticed it grew from my additions -- my dad joined the site (from the email I gave them) and contributed! I felt they had that subtle something when I noticed the broad appeal.
My.Netscape Being Re-Born as Web 2.0 Personalized Homepage
YuMe uses humans and machines for video ads
we're all happy with our co-founders, this was intended as a more theoretical question. i believe that people are always the best way to find the best people and asking the question who would you most want to work with, is a more perceptive way of seeing which entrepreneurs people respect the most.
My experience is that the lack of something else that holds your attention worsens your "ADD" with the money earning project. By having a hobby project on the side (10-20h), I can effectively work on the money project (50+ h) after it gets a bit tedious.

Also, having paying customers improves your discipline quickly...
I understood the intent of the question. :)

I wasn't making a point of any sort, just making a side-note that I wouldn't want to work with anybody else with my current project. To more relevantly answer the question: there's a lot out there that I respect. As my dream co-founder? I'd have to give that a little more thought.
Patents offer an illusion of protection -- their only real value is in boosting one's valuation. I think most technical barriers are an illusion too. It's ridiculously hard to create something new that actually works for users, but it's almost always trivial to clone something that exists.

Sites with no competitive technical barriers: YouTube/Flickr/MySpace/Digg/Reddit/Blogger/Slashdot/IMDB, etc.

Look how quickly video sites sprang up once YouTube showed us how to do it well. And despite the flood of more technically advanced clones, no one is making a dent in YouTube's traffic.
I think it's a no-brainer to add Google Analytics to any site. I also have my own set of little analytics instrumentation for monitoring extremely specific behavior in real-time.
Desktop Software: A Failed Model
Ok, I don't like DRM either, and agree it's most likely an overall negative, but his whole "post scarcity" thing is kind of BS. When he's being a bit more honest, he admits that you need to follow the scarcity to make money.
A Marketplace for Patents
'... So, since all Programmers are confined to the straight-jacket given to them by the Designers ...'

Not so. At MS, programmers are king.

A Program Manager comes up with the spec. It's up to the programmer(s) to implement it. So anything the programmer wants to ditch, goes.

Read more at JOS, 'Painless Functional Specifications - Part 3: But... How?' ~ http://tinyurl.com/3asbrp & in this excellent book, 'MICROSOFT SECRETS' (978-0028740485) ~ http://tinyurl.com/2ke4hf
The overall point is valid -- having a lot of users is the main way that a lot of companies make/want to make money, therefore companies should focus on scaling issues, therefore... "use Erlang."

However, conflating Web 1.0 "get fast" with Ruby on Rails "develop fast" is:

1) wrong: with extremely limited resources and a long list of priorities, startups need to start with fast, basic tools in order to get a functional site up -- to then discover what people want to use. scaling comes later, if ever.

2) self-serving: this guy seems to be intent on getting more companies using what he has to offer

Conclusion: mind the hyperbole.
there are no 'silver bullets'.

google has solved the 'get massive' partly in using the 'Map Reduce' [0] algorythm written in cpp. So looking at one particular language [1] alone to solve the problem(s) of parallel processing is bogus.

Reference

[0] Map Reduce, 'Google MapReduce tool'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce
[Accessed Tuesday, 6 March, 2007]

[1] Joel On Software, 'Can Your Programming Language Do This?'

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/08/01.html
[Accessed Tuesday, 6 March, 2007]
Fair enough, but my point remains that the programmers are implementing a spec designed by someone else. When your hackers are completely in control, you can judge them simply by their ability to get things done. If they're implementing someone else's spec, then measurement isn't that simple because their performance will be heavily influenced by the quality of the spec, no matter how much veto power you give them. So, judging by skill at optimizing might well be the next-best alternative.

Then again, maybe we're all being ridiculously overanalytical and Gates just meant "improving" when he said "optimizing".
America's Most Admired Companies
Google CEO, co-founders stick with $1 salary
101 Lessons from Project Management
Top 20 Motivation Hacks
Also see the notes and discussion at http://notelab.infogami.com/startupschool2006
Hello,

Of course, it is self serving, like 37signals buzz on Ruby was self-serving too.
I does not mean that you have to trust me. You can check by yourself and make your own opinion. I really doubt that people will switch to Erlang because I said it is the way to go.

They will do so because they have assessed the technology as an alternative. My goal is only to make Erlang known as an alternative for large scale infrastructure, which is not the case now. Nothing more.
I am not talking about silver bullet. I am talking about alternatives. For now people largely think that ther is only one way to do it. The point of my article is to show that there is more than one way to do it and that it might pay off to think about this before hand if you have to make a living of a web-based service.
'...Gates just meant "improving" when he said "optimizing".'

I think that's the case.
Successful Companies That Did Without an SQL-based RDBMS?
The last line of the article, "If you start with nothing, youre forced to think about everything.", really sums-up for me one of the real benefits of a startup: you can start from scratch. There are no legacy systems to integrate, no "historical awkwardness" (well, it's that way because it's always been that way...), and no politics. You get a blank slate with a startup - every aspect can be thought about and done right (for all values of "right" that are valid at the moment the thinking is done). Time to innovate...
Male vs. Female Bootstrappers
Boost The Readership Of Your Blogs
Ex-Google Answers Researchers Launch Q&A Site
Everything I Know About Business I Learned from Mountain-biking
Is news.YCombinator an interesting test bed for software startup philosophies?
Observing this newsgroup, I see at least a few things in this experiment:

1) Release Early, Release Often.
I am certain the programmer who wrote it is a better, more intelligent, more competent programmer than I.
IMHO there are so many irritations with this software because it was released prematurely. Even Paul Graham says it is bare-bones. Yet people keep coming back. In spite of it. It's because of the benefit of chatting at a high quality watering hole for entrepreneur elephants.

2) The UI is very different from the traditional newsgroup interface. If you are making people do things differently, then the benefit should be extraordinary (Weinberger?). I am realizing this for myself. (See
http://juwo-works.blogspot.com/2007/03/i-need-your-advice-startup-failing.html)

3) Did they have to write this from scratch - was it the right strategy. Couldnt they have built on top of some open source newsgroup code?
Conscious spending: How my friend spends $21,000/year on going out
by skin in the game, I am talking investment or some way they can have pain. To avoid irresponsible advice.
iShopr Feature Screencast
Q & A with Peter Thiel - Where Web 2.0 will take Silicon Valley
Webapps are sort of a throwback to the dumb terminal + mainframe model. This has certain advantages, and where those advantages apply, of course you're going to be successful. If you don't mind having less than 100 percent control over your email, and don't mind google's data mining it for [any|all] reasons, then go ahead and use gmail. Large corporations aren't going to do this, if only for legal reasons.
I hate to play devils advocate but is dropping out of school a reflection of what is to come when the start up work gets tedious? Please dont get me wrong I believe you should follow your passion and if that takes dropping out of school or climbing Mt. Everest follow Nike and just do it! Maybe dropping out of school shows the investor that you are serious but are you dropping out because you are serious or because youre bored and this offers you a way out? Am I way off on this line of thought? By the way if I was facing the same decision I would drop out too.
Demystifying Salary Information
24th bday coming up this year. A birthday gift in the form of a no-hassle $50,000 investment will be much appreciated :)
Monetize Your Blog With eBay
Sharing your bed with a VC dominatrix - the venture capitalist as a destructive force.
Craigslist and why it survived the bubble
The rise and fall of corporate R&D
The Laws of Simplicity - John Maeda
Reduce your website's bandwidth usage
i think the answer to (3) is that they wanted to test Arc...the web server is written in Arc also, if I am not mistaken...
Just Launched: AuctionAds Ebay Advertising Widget
This is certainly a great product, and the fact that the founders are in fact "scratching an itch" gives me confidence that they'll continue to do fine on the tech side of things.

I do wonder, however, what the business model is here. My hope is that the major parts vendors will recognize that Octopart is a good thing for them, and will play ball--both on the technical/database integration front, and, hopefully in terms of monetizing the product. Because it really is a great product.

One technical quibble, though: Octopart could improve its result quality a good bit by incorporating some semantic analysis. An example: a search for "blue led 3mm leaded" returns as its first result an SMD (i.e. non-leaded) part. What's going on here? It's matching the phrase "Leaded Process Compatible: No;" with a bit of not-terribly-deep semantic matching (leveraging the fact that part specs speak a relatively contrived and regularized language) it should be possible to recognize that "Leaded Process Compatible: No" is not a match for leaded.

Quibbles aside, I'm looking forward to watching Octopart improve, and, hopefully, succeed. We all know the competition sucks, after all.
Fan Support
It is interesting that the real reason why craigslist succeeds is not mentioned. IMHO, it's because of being like a *local* classifieds, free, and without word limits.
Also, the local dating, I suppose.
I dont think it was unique either. In 1994, when I was a outsource programmer at a Dallas telco, there was a hugely popular newsgroup on the company intranet where people bought and sold stuff, told each other of local events, and was a kind of meeting ground.
I tried to get my bosses at other places where I worked at, to do this - but the fears of legalities always killed it.
small bug in YC application (sorry, dont know where else to post this. Feature Request is for News.YC)
If your application has quotes, they are escaped each time one submits. They should be escaped only once.
From my application:
------------------------
They can ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂsqueeze more juiceÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂ from
Corporate R&D never worked very well in the first place. William Whyte wrote about how relatively unproductive it was way back in 1956 in The Organization Man.
So which employed RDBMS are not SQL-based? I don't many are even offered commercially, and I can't think of a company utilizing something such off-standard.
You answered your questions for 1 and 2. volida is right with number 3 -- they were also looking for something useful to build with Arc.
Cross-site request forgery
I had not read up on this. Good to know. news.ycombinator looks pretty safe with all the random fnids.
Im 39 going on 20. The other two co-founders involved in this start up are 49. They are extremely intelligent and the experience they bring to the table is invaluable. I know there is something to be said about youthful exuberance but experience has to factor in somewhere.

"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain
Updated link:

Are you thinking of working for a start up?

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/03/are-you-thinking-of-working-for-start.html
Scribd "YouTube for Text" Gets $300K
London FOWA 2007, MP3s and Presentations (Kevin Rose, Mike Arrington and others)
On second thought you might be able to do it here if you scraped the fnid before you rendered your page. I have not tried it so I don't know if the fnids are user specific, if not it should work.
Looking for webmasters post what your looking for here
Is anyone else here looking to be a webmaster for a website or looking for a website to work on, post what you are looking for and your email.
I love this idea. My co-founder and I were working on something similar a while ago before deciding to pursue our next idea.

Scribd's implementation is absolutely top-notch. I'm very excited for them, especially knowing that our ideas are shared by some other clever folks.
How to write a search engine
It's also with apostrophes. It might be fixed by now though.
Some of this is a little dated - for example there's not much point in managing a crawler yourself when you can just pay alexa to do it for you.

I still found a few useful tips though.
Similar bug with submission headlines existed. I believe that was also fixed.
Eons ("MySpace for old people") Raises Staggering $22 Million Round
I didnt really have a question - I am merely observing the ongoing experiment!
Any other principles you can observe?
Are you looking for a co-founder? But why do you expect a stranger to take risks with his/her career, make personal sacrifices, and be passionate about *your* idea before funding?
Have any VCs told you "No" already?
I am looking for a co-founder and this is exactly the struggle I have had. I wonder if most entrepreneurs who werent blessed with the right networks, aura and people skills also face this hurdle.
-
Anil AT juwo DOT com
The World's Top Web Markets (important to startups)
There's a good sales methodology (the Sandler system) which espouses pushing the "closing" stage nearer to the beginning of the process. Essentially, you're looking to end the sales cycle of deals which for whatever reason aren't going to work out. I like this blog post because it's roughly analogous. If you actually hear a "no" from a VC, consider yourself lucky that you aren't chasing a deal which won't ever close.
Make Money From Simple Comments You Leave
One of our startup strategies involved that we target Chinese, Spanish and French startup bloggers before reaching out to Americans. Most western startups overlook the significance of this huge market, and leave the door open for another company to take the spoils.

Far less companies submit review requests to foreign bloggers than they do to Americans. Consequently, our own experience turned out to be great; almost all the foreign blogs we contacted were more than happy to review us. This strategy works great for early stage startups that need that additional media coverage. So if you haven't yet tried this, I suggest you do :) Take care,
- Jawad Shuaib
Big part of the puzzle is to build value in your potential cofounder's eyes from your past ________ experiences. It is a two way street: your cofounder should need you as much as you need him. -Zaid
That's why I am headed to India this summer if all goes well:)

--Zaid
Perhaps even more important:

Four of those countries speak English, so there is no reason for most people to exclude them based on language barriers.

The US, UK, Canada and India are all equally viable.
We're almost as important as Perez Hilton...
Wired: YouTube purchase drives up Google's stock, saves Google money on purchase
Starbucks' "Venti" Problem
Ok, we have profiles: click on your name and put whatever you want in the "about" field.
'... Netvibes is a reprise of My.Netscape ...'

dave winer has not missed the significance of this ~ http://stories.scripting.com/2007/03/06/pointOfView.html
"Corporate R&D never worked very well in the first place." Huh?!? The first public fax transmission, the transistor, the first synchronous-sound motion picture, UNIX, C and C++, low-cost fiber optic phone systems, the first Wireless LAN, and numerous laser techonologies were all products of Bell Laboratories corporate R&D.