skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
same reason you blog, or write comments on news.yc = self expression

this could be funny things you've just seen
your state of mind
an announcement
a statement of emotion

also twitter allows you to have public or private interactions - so your outside twitter may be something different to strangers compared to close friends. Twitter is an extension of our human desire to express ourselves through communication. Its very interesting because of that.
Thousands chase the dream to be independently wealthy through hacking. To have the FU money required to live a truly free life. So what's it like to go from stressing about an unexpectedly high phone bill to deciding where in the world you want to live and which car matches your personality best?

Most programmers live pretty comfortable lives, but there's a vast difference between making ends-meet and having enough money to make decisions without that being the biggest factor.

It seems like the few who've achieved this have all been strangely silent. I suppose they don't want to be seen as flaunting it, but I think there's plenty of room to discuss this without going over that line.

Have any hackers discussed this publicly?
CalacanisCast 17 beta -- Interview with TellMe co-founder the day after selling to Microsoft for ~$1bn
[Prediction: Until there is widespread WiFi and 3G access to the Internet via mobile phones (in other words, mobile-based business can reach consumers by going around network operators portals) there will be limited opportunities to establish profitable mobile-based businesses. Established companies should steer clear until then.]

Aren't we seeing this trend already? Considering this article was written last year. Nokia has already included the SIP stack in their series 60 phones. Motorola is also working on a SIP stack for their line up of phones as well. Doesn't this say anything? Hell the Motorola A910 has Wi-Fi connectivity therefore making the possibility of IP based communications a reality.
PostgreSQL versus MySQL: an unbiased comparison:
http://www-css.fnal.gov/dsg/external/freeware/pgsql-vs-mysql.html

We could spend all day on this, though.
Don't do mobile wireless. Even if you have a good idea. Especially if you have a good idea.

Trust me. It's just not worth it.
The Others' Mistakes Fallacy
Live Hot n' Steamy Startup Sexiness (Barely SFW)
Why would it not be worth it then? Cuz if I was presented with some compelling evidence at to why I should not pursue mobile wireless. I will be more than willing to change the direction of my start up.
I think that the most important thing to learn from del.icio.us is that a web 2.0 service should be useful even if no one else is using it (or perhaps other people are using it but designating all their data as private).

The social aspects can be a bonus later when you have more users. But you should not depend on them to attract users initially.
I could be wrong, but I think there's an auto-voting exploit here with the bookmarklet submission API. Without a preview page before submission anyone could load YC news URLs that result in auto upvotes for any number of articles.

Another sort of separate issue I think is with submissions that include URLs pointing to "news.ycombinator.com" in general, they should probably be disallowed completely to be safe.

I'm not trying to do anything abusive whatsoever, just poking around.
I wonder if a lot of peeps here are doing the same thing as well.
Seth's Blog: The realistic entrepreneur's guide to venture capital
Digg provides a lot of value to people who don't bother signing up, so its 1 million signups figure doesn't actually indicate that they only have 1 million users.
Interesting content. Too bad it is one of the most poorly written articles I've seen in some time. It is so bad, in fact, that the meaning of some sentences has be to inferred...
How not to write a business plan
zkinion: here are 2 posts about this:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/09/03/making-money-online-stats/
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/youtube-is-already-wildly-profitable/
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Google Buys Gapminder
SeekSift: the Right Balance?
Disclosure: my company (a software firm in NYC) is behind SeekSift.

I just wanted to follow-up my prior post (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=340) and thank everyone who responded with comments and suggestions, particularly the apartment hunter who helped clarify how we could make it simpler and more effective.

And while we think we've struck the right balance now between simplicity and effectiveness, we remain open to more feedback, so please continue to let us know.
The Dip by Seth Godin
My Favorite Godin Post: Hitting Lows before the High
I'll second the motion that the article is poorly written, but the content was valuable. Things like logging-in being a barrier for people are truths that one doesn't really think of when designing a web-based system.
It's all about the team.
"Comment order: The development and the drama..."
The Cliff
Actually, pgreplicator saw its last release in 2001, and I'm not aware of anyone who uses it in production. The fact that it requires PostgreSQL 7.1 (which is ancient, buggy, and unsupported by the Postgres developers) would be a pretty big clue not to use it. The most popular choice for replication (async master-slave) with Postgres is Slony I. Commandprompt's replicator is another choice, although it is a commercial product ($1000 USD per machine).

When you say that "Postgres' performance advantage over MySQL on a VPS doesn't really exist.", I'm not sure what you mean: DBMS performance is a complicated subject, and significant performance differences exist between MySQL and PostgreSQL on essentially ANY hardware platform. For example, if your app uses complex queries with a lot of joins and subselects, Postgres optimizer will likely give you significantly better performance than MySQL's, regardless of whether it happens to be running on a VPS. Similarly, MyISAM's performance with an update-intensive concurrent workload is going to be pretty bad, regardless of the hardware platform.
A Comprehensive Guide to Starting your Freelance Career
However, it is quite out of date: for example, PostgreSQL has had a native Win32 port for several years, and the "--enable-locale" / "--enable-multibyte" configure options have not been necessary (or supported) for even longer. "Large row" (TOAST) support has been around since 7.1. etc.
10 ways to create a breakthrough in your working life (and in the rest of it too).
How to Win Friends and Influence People (pdf)
PG recommended this in one or another essay, and I found it a rather suspect claim, but having started reading the PDF it seems like it might be helpful, if one has the strength of character to truly change.
Enviropreneur Camp - a two-week educational experience in Montana for environmental entrepreneurs
Ask YCN: Contextual Ads on a Personalized Dynamic Site/App?
As I'm exploring advertising solutions, I've discovered that most ad networks aren't really appropriate for a site that hides most content behind a registration or is highly personalized, like a social web app.

This is because most ad networks (AdSense, YPN, AdBrite) rely on spidering your content to do their targeting... and they don't log in to your site to do it. If they can't get into your site to see the content, they can only show run-of-network ads, or ads based on what you tell them explicitly about your users in general.

Is there a product out there that is more suited towards showing targeted ads based on protected page content? Or passing keywords as parameters to the ad script?

There are definitely privacy issues here, but I thought I'd ask here to see if anyone knew of a way to show my users relevant ads, and not just "hey I think you're a 20-something with lots of disposable income" ads...

Maybe I have to do another startup just to serve this market?
Why DormItem De-Ajaxified
When you change (from a corporate employee to an entrepreneur), all your relationships change
The Top 7 mistakes I made at Sampa, a Startup tale.
With adbrite, you can target specific keywords for them to target their ads towards, instead of having them spider...You should also be able to do the same with YPN...

Dan
DormItem
argh, I've just upvoted and now there's nothing I can do to undo it...

see: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4971
I initially thought this was a silly idea but I'm now strangly addicted to it.. Why live my own life when I can watch someone else!
5 things learned from Casey Serin
This ties in with Clayton Christensen's work in The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution.

Christensen's thesis is basically that technological change is continuously creating Local Mins like point C, in the form of disruptive innovations. These are technological breakthroughs that target a smaller, less profitable market. Since they're less profitable, they're unattractive to established players, who're stuck at point B. However, their performance can quickly improve up to point D.

As a startup, you want to enter at point C and target point D instead of going for point B. If you head for point B, you'll face the incumbents, all of whom have more resource than you. If you head for point D, the incumbents have to go down through point C in order to catch you. They won't want to do so, because it's painful for them.
What makes early stage investment opportunties attractive to investors
Shows how far behind these guys are. There are other ways of ordering comments.
But can you do this at runtime via parameters?

I know I can set site-wide keywords, or section-targeted keywords on most ad sites, but that doesn't help when much of the content is user-generated AND non-spiderable...
Gapminder: very cool new acquisition by Google
Why does he say:

10. You will probably have to replace many of your employees if you raise money from someone.
"Viacom is not entirely opposed to sharing its content with others, if paid for it."
Hmm, that's true. So should I add a preview page (thereby making the bookmarklet less immediate)?
Evan Williams tells How Odeo Screwed Up
Add a preview page for new submissions, and remove the auto-upvote! Especially as there's no way to undo either a submission OR an upvote...

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3902
How stable is Google?
during gapminder presentation during leweb3.
playback at minute 7:09: http://portal.vpod.tv/leweb3/70070
Their logo, incidentally, was done by Alexis Ohanian, who invented the Reddit alien.
Viacom and their confused executives are doing everything they can to maintain the economics of scarcity that have driven their businesses for 50 years. Consumers will always choose choice, this effort is doomed.
That is a very clever visualization of a 4D data set. I really liked the concept of Swivel.com when it released, but gapminder + google seems like tough competition.
I Will Teach You To Be Rich - The Myth of the Great Idea
Superb idea! This is the future of broadcasting! They will be able to license this platform and allow others to broadcast the same way. This will also allow people, who lead boring lives, to live through others. Reality TV is a big hit because of this and it looks like justin.tv is a huge step forward towards even a more intimate experience. I have a feeling that in the near future, some people will live someone else's lives. Scary!
Who Wants a Great Startup Idea? Here's One and It's All About Blog Trust
LSVP: Time Rich or Time Poor Users?
Unfortunately this is one of the later editions, "revised" by Carnegie's wife after his death.

I would only recommend reading earlier editions: http://abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=dale+carnegie&tn=friends+influence&yrh=1960
I keep meaning to write this one, but it is extremely dangerous territory. One of the many strange things you discover when you get rich is how dangerous it is to talk about it. Most people don't mind, but occasionally one will go nuts on you in a way that is enough to make you not want to talk about the subject at all.
Musicload: 75% of customer service problems caused by DRM
10 Best/Worst Cities for software developers (by salary and cost of living)
Key Quote:

Musicload said that artists choosing to drop DRM saw a 40 percent increase in sales since December, and that more artists and labels are showing interest.
Quite a few news.YC users are in http://justin.tv/#justin.tv.1
If you have an idea and a management team that's good enough to make it with the help of YC, it's hard to believe you couldn't get the funding and make the connections that you need to succeed in another way.

I don't know a whole lot about the success of YC companies, but it looks like Reddit is their big success so far. Reddit sold for a reported 65 million (according to The Google), and they needed relatively little additional funding after the seed money. So let's say YC retained 3% of the company, they make 2 million which is a 100x return on their investment. Wow, I just did the math now...that's pretty impressive.

Update: A new search on The Google (link) suggests that the purchase price may have been much lower. Proponents of the "50-million my ass" school of thought are suggesting 5 million is closer to the mark. At 5 million, YC gets a 10x return on investment which is what all VC money is shooting for among successful (non-broke) companies.

http://reddit.com/user/bmatkin/

Larger point, if you're in it to win it you should be able to pull it off with or without YC. Sure YC connections and advice are tremendously valueable...but 5x to 20x better than the other smart VC/angel/seed money out there? No way!
I hate focus grabbing... any UI quirks that annoy you?
They mentioned "live polling" a few minutes ago. That would be way cool. Interactive entertainment at its finest.
YCombinator - A Force to Reckon With, A Model to Replicate
Best guesses:

a.) Because the VCs will fire some of them

b.) Because the remainder will quit over the treatment of the employees in a.)

VCs often like to install their own people in key positions within their newly funded companies. Oftentimes, the people they replace are well-respected nonconformists. The replacements are well-connected incompetents. There's nothing more demoralizing than some moron in a suit taking over for the guy who's helped you a hundred times.
Yeah, that can expand alot in the future with wimax.
Is YC a force to reckon with?...a model to replicate? I'd love to hear some guesses about how well they've done so far.

I tried to estimate their return on Reddit (http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4474), but couldn't find even a ballpark number for the sale (paul? ;) ). My best guess is that they did great, but not stratospheric. With Kiko selling for 200K, they can't have done much more than break even.

Perhaps seed money has different economics than later stage VC money, which traditionally looks for 10x return on 10%(+) of companies. Are they getting in early in hopes of getting 100x return on 1%(+) of companies?
Mistake #8. Causing unneeded confusion with the name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_%28software%29
We have no idea how much money something like YC might make long term. VC is a well understood business, but this is completely new. We're in the black at the moment, but not buying jets.

We lost money on Kiko, incidentally. Their later stage investors got paid back, and the founders made a little, but YC got 38 cents on the dollar.
I don't look solely on trackrecords. Business is hard work but to some extent also luck. Hits in the past are no	guaranty for future hits.
Guy believes that entrepreneurs can change the world and make it a better place. Sounds quite naive but to me a vision is much more motivating than money and trackrecords.
This is an interesting adaptation of the notion of glogging / moblogging; I have to wonder to what extent these guys were inspired by the much more theoretical work done with eyetaps (amazing technology, but not really scalable). The interesting thing to see will be whether, since this is meant to be outward-facing (as opposed glogging's introspective bent), it will suffer from the lack of editorial control. Basically, does a person's life have a high enough density of interesting content that it is worth watching? If the answer is yes, then there is definite potential for radical developments in social media.

\me wanders off to check Joi Ito's moblog.
I assume the reason apps (or actually I think it's the windowing system) do this is because they assume that your grandmother will open an app and then patiently wait for it to appear, and if it accidentally appears behind another application, they'll think something is broken. I agree, it's not the best assumption.
I happen to be using gnome a lot for my window manager and it actually very rarely gives a newly opened task the focus- I don't know if that's default though or some setting I set at some point.
It's interesting- I think most people would rather get the higher salary regardless of cost-of-living or spending power. Some kind of gratification to their self-worth or something.
In the black already...with more companies in the pipeline...seems like a great place to be!

What's so new about this model? Tapping into an under-exploited resource (hackers)? Or the economics of micro-seed funding?
Another possibility is that YC could maintain a higher percentage of success, at a lower individual return. Because YC attracts some of the best young talent around, is very selective in funding, and seriously optimizes their fundees chances of success, it's not unreasonable that YC could maintain a better batting average than the VCs.

Another possibility is that because YC tends to form definite relationships with the founders they fund, they can count on the law of large numbers within, not just between, teams. For instance, YC lost money on Kiko, but is also invested in justin.tv--if justin.tv makes it, the YC[kiko folk] relationship could still end in the black.

N.B. This is all complete speculation; any more insight from pg would be appreciated.
Just about everyone expects DRM to disappear at some point, sooner or later, as a matter of natural order. Everyone except the RIAA and Msft.
Shooting in the dark, I'd say one big difference is the focus on the founders, rather than just throwing money in and hoping for something valuable to pop out. You can see that in the YC application--very different from a request for a business plan.
I haven't written about them because they are making money comparable to the likes of Sequoia, but the effect it is having and will continue to have in making smart people realize their true potential.

Is there any measure to transform the value of awareness, mentorship and intellectual capital into money?
Quantitatively and predictively, no. You can only look at the outcomes from YC-funded companies, see to what extent they beat the curve. Of course, you still have to sort out the potentially higher quality of YC fundees to begin with. It's a hard statistical problem; any takers?
cross reference this post/discussion in the "best" section: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=638
This is crazy, it's like that movie EdTV, only geekier.
very interesting. This might be the first time Google ended up acquiring someone based on their Google TechTalk.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=engEDU+gapminder
Paul Buchheit: Equity math for startups (sometimes 0.1% equals $138 million)
Good stuff. Not really anything new from the YC philosophy of business, but nice to hear it from someone in the trenches. BTW- welcome back BioGeek!
Higher percentage of success seems like a plausible outcome of the YC model. Everyone involved is clearly committed to something more than the 15-20K. Perhaps that's the advantage of recruiting hackers instead of b-school graduates...it's easier to endow hackers with good business connections than it is to endow b-school types with smartness!?
Khoi Vinh Redesigns Yahoo! - awesome slide deck from SXSW
Product placement will get them generating cash pretty quick. Could be difficult to scale up though, presuming there's only one Justin. What's the chance they've managed to file a patent for this as a 'business concept'?
Failure IS an option
This could be a good way to watch startup school if you didn't get in or could not make it.
The implementation here is really the amazing part; the basic data-vis tool is pretty simple (I wrote a much uglier variant in Mathematica, inspired by a proprietary stats app), but if they can/will expose this via a clean, open API, then this sort of visualization can become much more widespread. I don't know if/how google intends to make money from this, but if it's available as essentially a commodity visualization component for the web, then everyone benefits.
I've just spent an hour on gapminder. So cool.
Much better than Swivel, in my opinion, though clearly more limited.
Higher percentage of success for YC invested companies certainly seems plausible. However, YC funded companies have a tendency to aim mostly for the exit strategies; having no real business plan means that those startups are more likely to financially fail.

Reddit was a success, though. My best guess is that Conde Nast bought it for under $3 million. This leads to an interesting question: how long would've Reddit survived, without generating revenues, had it not been bought?

Ultimately, all business must create financial value. YC, though an excellent opportunity for us hackers, should put a greater emphasis on the actual business model. We are all in debt to PG, Jessica, Rob, and Trevor; it would be pity if it ever shuts down due to a failure in viable return on investment.
Cost of living is kind of misleading because it depends a lot on how you spend money. The biggest difference is housing, but other things, such as cars, are nearly the same. If you're ok living in a little apartment for now, then the difference isn't as big as it sounds. (so if you live cheaply, then you should actually be able to save more in one of the high cost/pay cities)

To me, the more important issues are quality of life and quality of work. There's no way that I'd want to live or work in Houston, even if the housing is really cheap.
Dodgeball Vs. Twitter vs. Facebook
Another issue with DRM is that the artists really have no control over if their product has it or not. When they started recalling albums at SonyBMG some artists were unaware that the label had put this protection on their product.
Thats similar to a chapter in the Felix Dennis book where he talks about how execution is more than an "idea".

http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/minisites/howtogetrich/
whoa! where'd those 59 points come from?
The Absolute Need To Understand