skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like they want you to actually provide something there first that has not been live before. Their application, though, includes stats on your current website, so I guess their plan is to focus on some new feature to be presented there for the first time. They also want you to explain how their conference is causing your company to accelerate development, etc.

I don't see any downside in applying or getting the media attention of getting selected. One option: get selected, get the media attention, then forgo any radical high trajectory bubble bursting funding proposals, and then use that momentum to get into YC.
Next funding round? So you plan on waiting until 2008 for someone to even start on it?
> You want to fail as quickly as possible.

A bunch of us got that out of the way!
:-) i was wondering if anyone used better/different ones than CNet
He says all you need is a risk-taking attitude (#1) and hard work (#2). Both of these attributes are prerequisites for a successful startup and the opposite of what you see in most big companies.

This guy must work for big companies where shipping bloatware in less than 5 years counts as innovation.
rms: how did you find out about this page?
Project San Dimas: Cleaning Up eBay's UI
Social Arbitrage: The New New Path to Abnormal Returns
as soon as i get my invites i'll post something on here.
Paul Graham - Wikiquote
"Startup comedy" on Hollywood's radar (view Land of OpportuniTV video)
"I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody." Bill Cosby
It's on pg's index.
Lacking any context I'm not sure I'd know what Abe is working on from that one speech.
The angle of ascent seems interesting. Scribd is YouTube for Docs and they're growing like it.
I was at CTIA a couple months back and got a demo of Openwave's "Adaptive Mobility" suite. The site doesn't show very much, but I remember it being a pretty slick, personalized UI for cell phones. I think they've opened it up to allow people to develop widgets for it too. The problem is that it's just a java program that runs on the cell phone OS, when really it should be the OS itself.

http://www.openwave.com/us/products/adaptive_mobility_suite/
The takeaway point: marketing plans soon may have to describe how a startup will run marketing as a profit center. So when you're done (re-)reading On Lisp, you'll probably want to crack Robert McKee's Story, as it is the bible for screenwriting (e.g., sitcom design) :-)
Usually I'll just Google the product name and follow links. If the planned purchase is big enough, I'll lurk enthusiast/specific forums until I get the information I need.
Agreed. Hence, a new key to sustainable competitive advantage is creating media that:

1) increases awareness of the community

2) showcases participants in the community

3) generates profits
Patents, why bother?
Care and feeding of social media's three classes: creators, curators and consumers
The real question is which sites best hide the fact that they exist to splatter affiliate links all over the place.

While searching for hosting last year, it took me hours before I figured out that all the hosting review sites were affiliate farms. Forums too, just look at the number of people offering up $97 off dreamhost hosting plans. At a $100 per sale I can't blame them for trying.
Tale of two startups
Are you thinking of working for a start up?
It's a great time to start a business
Flickr case study: Still about tech for exit?
Frequent Cookie Deletion by 3 out of 10 U.S. Internet Users Leads to Overstatements in Audience Sizes by a Factor as High as 2.5!
eBay is definitely in desperate need of a UI update. The Apollo project looks pretty slick from the demonstration (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html ), though I'm curious about performance issues in something as time sensitive as live auctions.
Books? Amazon.
Everything else? I just Google it.

Yes, I know there's a bunch of opinion/review sites out there but they all suck and are fairly biased due to spam.

A big issue is that most of the products on specialized review sites are highly polarized... either highly negative or highly positive. Dissatisfied people, overwhelingly, seem to have enough incentive to go and review (negatively) a product. Most of the people who are satisfied are content with that and don't feel the need to waste their time and review. On the other end, highly elated people are inclined to review positively a product. So in the end, most of these voluntary review sites suck. The only reviews I trust almost completely are Consumer Reports reviews. They are impeccable and free of bias.
I don't believe that there is no market for "tools" anymore, nor that any new successful web page needs to be social.
How to Add an API to your Web Service
Why Your Small Business Should Blog
Does design matter to newspaper readers?
Maximizing Parallel Downloads for Faster Page Loading
Finding Great Dev Talent
Advice for Finding Good Cofounders : Learn to Fight...from Marriage Research
To support my comment: what about iTunes? It seems to fall in the "tools" category by the articles standards, yet it is fairly new and successful. Sorry to go on about this, but that article somehow irks me: if you have a good idea, go for it, if not, don't. Will somebody really think "I have this great idea, but wait, it is not a social network, so it can't possibly work"? I hope not...
iTunes is more about dealmaking and vendor lock-in than it is about technology or tools. I mean, it's just a file-downloading and hard-disk-access tool, plus a DRM system, plus a nice UI. People were downloading files and accessing hard disks and writing UI's in 1970; maybe they didn't have DRM, but that's hardly an advance. No, the reason iTunes is popular is because a) the iPod is popular, and the iPod only works (well) with iTunes; and b) Apple has made big deals with big record companies to put tons of songs on iTunes. iTunes is not a technological step up; it's just a parlaying of Apple's muscle and hardware marketshare.

So, even before iTunes existed, you'd probably have difficulty starting a startup which was supposed to do what iTunes does now, since without the iPod and Apple's negotiating power, you're left with a file downloading utility with DRM and no songs from major records, and nobody wants that. So iTunes not only isn't a tool, it isn't a startup-applicable idea; nobody would shy away from doing iTunes because it's a non-social-network application, because they wouldn't try to do iTunes to begin with.

Edit: Anyway, I think it's reasonable to think that a lot of the obvious straight-web-tools genres are well-done enough already that you'd have difficulty starting a startup in one. There might be whole new markets for straight tools out there for the taking, but they're at the very least harder to think of than they were in 1995. A lot of the equivalently easy-to-think-of social applications are just now getting off the ground, so the whole essay kind of makes sense.

The most interesting thing about the article to me is that it seems to imply a theory of waves of market gaps closing, and that maybe each market gap gets created by the closing of the one before it. There was a market gap for PCs, then that got (more or less) filled, which created a market gap for connectivity, the filling of which created a market gap for web tools, and now that closing has created a market gap for social tools. It could be totally bunk, but it's fun to think about anyway.
I have clearly always somehow felt that it was like this, but I never really realized that there were these two distinct types of "judgement," or perhaps better (but uglier) types "being judged". It is certainly an important (however small) idea, and one without capitalism and freedom in general must really be hard to deal with. Put it into the "Zen of Business" teachings.
> The irony is, the biggest disruptive innovation that ever came from the Internet could in fact be open source software, and the old industry it destroys will probably be venture capital.

The interplay between open source and trade secret is very interesting, as is the fact that possibly the majority of top-flight software development is open source and not going to make anyone rich.

People spend many years learning in order to contribute to amazing, complex software; yet they are shown up financially by kids with web 2.0 sites that run ads.
I think it's fair to interpret "software that works" to include "software that users want".

In the sense of "Gmail is great software, because it just works!"
Bloggers do need a "hook" or "story" when posting about you, and the easiest one possible is "New Site X Launches".

Strikes me as an odd question though. Why wouldn't you do an official launch?
Why Seth Godin doesn't have comments on his blog:

"First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters."

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/why_i_dont_have.html
I tend to think about it like the Cambriam Explosion: it seems to me that at times a new technology comes along that is so much better than anything before it that for a while it's adaptors have a kind of free ride, untill a winner evolves. My personal favourite example are computer games: it seems most kinds of games were already being written as soon as home computers were available. Eventually a few genres emerged that crushed all the other ones. "Doom" was another such leap that triggered an armada of First-Person-Shooters.

So now for a while everything "social" will survive for a while, untill the big players have manifested themselves.

Anyway, I didn't want to make a point for iTunes, just "prove" that social networks are not the only kind of applications successful today.
The Danger team already accomplished what you want with the sidekick. Word on the street is that Danger 2.0 (android) was acquired by google a few years ago. Everyone I know who works at google (except the lame people) hate it. Maybe you can figure out how to poach all those people.

Getting anything interesting onto an existing carrier's phones is a nightmare. Not only will you need to make a better phone OS, you will have to start your own MVNO. Helio has made an attempt - their "ocean" device might be worth looking at.
and reincarnation is just round the corner, perhaps.

The Pakistani Spectator
Whoops. I think we're in violent agreement. I agree with keeping burn rate low, and not moving to a startup hub... especially if the business is an online one.
They were also based far from HQ out in New York.
Interesting you mention performance, because I would imagine that most power buyers (target users for this app) use "Buy It Now" as opposed to traditional live auctions.
Great to point out, but isn't that irrelevant?
This page has been up since the application form for the first wfp was announced if my memory is correct. Very little progress has been done in mobile user experience in 5-7 years so a few more months wont harm anyone.
Can we have a JavaScript login to Y Combinator news?
I've added a post in the "improvements" thread. Please vote up if you think it's useful.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13271

Cheers, Ralph.
I mean like the way reddit does it, it is much nicer then being sent to another web page.
You wrote: The titles are "user", "# of posts", "karma" & "karma/# of posts" ?

Yes, that's right. It's clear that "# of posts" is never over 50.

I suppose some readers here know Ruby, Perl, or Python, but haven't come through _The Unix Programming Environment_ route or done shell programming like we had to do before those languages existed, so I thought there may be some interest in an explanation of the pipeline. Bear in mind that the script interspersed here will have characters missing due to the site's software. The hex-encoded version in this thread can be run to get the verbatim script.

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

First, we get the source of the leaders web page with wget.

tr '"' '\n\n' |

Because that has very long lines, and it's easier to pluck at most one user id per line, transliterate double-quote and greater-than sign characters into newlines.

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

This then allows sed to only print lines that begin with /user?id=/ after deleting that same text, resulting in a list of user ids, one per line.

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

xargs takes each of these user ids in turn and runs a wget to fetch the "submitted" web page for that user id. All the web pages' HTML goes down the same pipe, concatenated together.

tr '' '\n' |

Again, we transliterate greater-than signs to split long lines at a convenient place.

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

And sed gets used to filter out lines detailing the points scored by a user for a post, re-formating the information on the way, e.g. "42 points by ...id=ralph" becomes "ralph 42". There's one line containing user id and score for each of the scores listed on the one web page.

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]}' |

All these (user id, score) tuples get fed to awk. It uses two associative arrays, AKA dicts or hashes, to build up information for each line it reads. Both arrays are indexed by user id; "$1" in awk refers to the first word of the input line. Array "c" maintains a count of the number of times a user id is seen. Array "s" accumulates the scores for each user id. Then at the end of all the input we loop through each index of "c", i.e. the user ids that have been seen, printing the user id, the frequency of that id, the sum of its scores, and the mean.

sort +3nr

These columns are given to sort which is told to sort on the fourth column, i.e. mean, numerically, in reverse. My sort(1) doesn't give the warning yours does, but you're right; I'm using old-school syntax that is deprecated but my fingers know how to type it. :-)

Cheers, Ralph.
Platforms and languages should be orthogonal. They have become tied together because the glue provided by the OS sucks.
https://sourceforge.net/index.php ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/

Neither are turned into links.

&gt;=> &lt;=< &amp;=&
AllOfMp3 Down For 8 Hours And Counting
How Aggregate Displays Change User Behavior
I used to work on Razor software. I knew it was junk, but where to start fixing it? There is a deep problem with the companies that create mobile phones- carriers are their customers, but not their end users. The only company that seems to be innovating at all is Apple, which has enough clout to ignore what the carriers tell them and just bring something to market that users might want. What can a startup do in this space? Sell their software platform to a phone company? Motorola is taking ten years to switch to Linux/Java platform. The only hope for mobile phones is that Wi-Fi or some other technology will become capable of competing with the carriers. Until then, most of the innovators will be holding their breath.
I think that the distinction between the two kinds is rather artificial, from the applicant's perspective. Both involve estimators of your ability, be it your ability to take an exam, or your ability to write an application. Both are more-or-less correlated with something important (being good in math; being a good potential entrepreneur). And both estimators are rewarded for being good. Teachers get a raise, investors get money. Why should one rejection be personal, and the other not?

In fact, the incentive to be accurate seems much larger for investors than for teachers. Thus, I would be much more bummed about being ignored by a smart investor, than about being given an F by a 9-to-5 teacher.
Great post, thanks.
"if the difference between the 20th and 21st best players is less than the measurement error, you've still done that optimally."

I thought that the coach was responsible for minimizing the measurement error. Then, the best he could do is to pick the best team. How do you define measurement?
Microsoft's Video Spoof of 'Tommy Boy' - A whole new level of scary
I had never seen this one before. Wow, I thought the other Ballmer vids were bad!
Mozilla Working On Firefox Companion For eBay
Paul Graham Interviewed By David Weinberger (Pretty Interesting)
The interviewer seems pretty clueless and confrontational, but PG handles it quite well and makes some great points.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2006/11/09/web-of-ideas-with-paul-graham-2/
What other communities do you frequent online?
can someone please make an edit of this video... the interviewer is killing me!!! I stopped watching after 3 minutes...
Wondering if you are taking part in any other online communities. Myself, I don't even know many places to visit. Sometimes I indulge in discussions on Slashdot-like pages (not a really community), another place is a closed community run by a friend, with mostly other friends from real life. How many other people have a place like that? Do many people just use the social pages (MySpace etc) for that? Somehow I doubt it, it doesn't feel the same.

It just would be great to find likeminded people for the one or other thing. For exmaple sometimes I enjoy discussing economics, but I couldn't find a good online community for that yet.
Same here. Here is a business idea: write a software that automatically creates transcripts of online videos. I hate the YouTube culture (old fashioned guy who likes to read here).
Actually - that's pretty hard to do. What would probably be more "doable" is to take a transcript (done manually by a transcriptionist) and sync up the text with the video.

You could provide links in a transcript which when clicked take you to the part of the video in question, if you'd like to see it. You could also go the other way, and use a transcript to provide subtitles.

Any ideas on how to make this happen? My intial thought is to exploit pauses and breaks in the sound and map them to sentences, etc. Voice mapping would help too, so you could map a sentence to Paul Graham and another sentence to the interviewer.

What would be pretty cool (actually, REALLY cool now that I think about it) would be desiging a transcript markup language that could be married to a video. Has anyone done this? Why not?
I think everything should be better than a RAZR. We use it as a worst-case target device at our company. But, more generally, the power of carriers is definitely a problem, and as I hear it's way worse in the US. Their biggest nightmare is voip in the mobile, obviously, so I guess they simply try to lock down any innovation in the usable mobile platform area.
Wow, something that's legal in the US but not elsewhere. Don't see that too often.
The students finally get to ask questions about 45 minutes in - then it gets a bit better. The interviewer does make it pretty painful to watch though ;)
"The woman who is usually the more submissive partner brings Eighty percent of complaints up first."

How is bringing up the complaints more submissive? I think it is usually the women who get their way in relationships...
This is big shit
Knowing tonnes of women might be using the site, many WILL notice it:) For such sites details matter a lot; and getting the basics such as this wrong can get your users to lose trust in your site.
crooksandliars, webhostingtalk
At the risk of looking stupid, do you mean "mode" rather than "median"? I thought median was the middle element of an ordered sample, and mode the most common. Also, any Python in there?

Cheers, Ralph.
Ah I've read about that psychologist and his research in Blink(book). That's a good book too.
If the service has been publicly available for a while, an official launch would be at some arbitrary point much as getting rid of "beta" also occurs at an arbitrary point.
Using character entities, e.g. &amp; to give an &, works on submitting the comment, but editing the comment populates the form's area with an unescaped ampersand causing corruption on submitting the form. Encoding and decoding needs to be symmetrical.

Cheers, Ralph.
I know that speech recognition probably is not quite good enough yet :-( I have another interest in this: since I am not a native english speaker, I find it often hard to understand everything that is being said in a video. English subtitles would often be helpful (especially for those videos of interviews or conference speeches etc.).

Perhaps Amazons mechanical turk could come in handy here? Would a clone of the mechanical turk specialised on movie transcripts be feasible? Or is it too special interest? (Perhaps most people either understand the words or they would prefer a translation?).

As for syncing subtitles: I don't know the details anymore, but I remember from ripping DVDs that the subtitles come simply in a text file along with the movie. So presumably something like you propose already exists.
How about &#42; yielding *.

Cheers, Ralph.
Sure, that exists because the movie studios usually ship movies out with a transcription. I don't think something like this exists for run-of-the-mill type videos. In the example of the video above, if there WERE a transcript, you could use the software I propose above to provide subtitles automatically.
How is It to be a Startup "Outside the Valley"?
Top 10 Social Bookmarking Sites - April 2007
No, not that I have a say
Web 2.0 Expo Keynote: Amazon's Web Scale Computing Platform
There's a service in Japan where you can associate text to a point in a video. You type text like chat while watching a video, and the text is recorded with the timestamp and played back along the video. Association is bidirectional---you can jump to certain time point in the video from the text as well. Currently most people just making fun, putting funny text on videos, but it would be quite useful to attach transcription by collaboration of audiences.

Unfortunately they only provide closed service for registered users: http://www.nicovideo.jp/
(Actually they originally used YouTube as a video source and had no access restriction. But they got so much popular that YouTube had to shut down access from their site.)
Raising Money is a Band-Aid, Not a Cure
Amazon S3 hits 5 Billion stored objects
It's a little concerning that they're losing money on these infrastructure products. Goes back to a conversation we had before--be careful putting all your eggs in one basket. If they were to stop these services or charge a lot more for them then there are a few of us who'd have issues.
Ofoto (now Kodak Gallery), Shutterfly and Webshots are not dead. There are different reasons people share photos, just as there are different reasons people share text. That we even call such sites "photo sharing" shows how primitive our understanding is. Imagine if we called news.yc "just another text sharing site".

"All the good tools are taken" is the statement I disagree with most in this article.
Great article - thanks for the link.
Taste for Makers
http://reddit.com

http://programming.reddit.com
Technologically, news.yc is just another text sharing site. It's only the people and the way they interact that separate it from Reddit, Digg, Fark, etc. So if you want to make a new "text sharing website" and have it be successful, you better have something better than the technology to differentiate yourself from your competition.
Getting rejected by YC is not failure. YC has specific things they're looking for, and only so many resources to go around; getting rejected means that (a) you didn't match what they were looking for or (b) you didn't seem as promising as some of the other people who applied.

A friend of mine is a marathon runner who usually comes in under 3 hours. It turns out that there are enough people in that category that the Boston Marathon offers slots by lottery, and this year he wasn't one of them. Not getting a slot in the Boston Marathon doesn't mean you can't finish the race; it just means you have to find a different place to run.