skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The beginning of the end of Web 2.0. Sigh.
What Wufoo Looked for in an Angel Investor
Looks like they have the same feature set. We'll have to see if Bugmenot can handle the load, though.
I think that's a bad idea. I'm sure there are laws that need reconsideration, there always are. But fundamentally, collective bargaining is an important right because individual workers are worth so little all by themselves. In order for the dynamic you mention in your post to work employees have to be able to organize. They cannot do this if all the legal aspects (aka threats of force) favor the employers. Employers will use Divide and Conquer to win every time.
OnStartups.com - Seeking Stellar Software Entrepreneurs
Demo of completely overhauled Google Analytics
info on news agregator reddit style
Last.fm To Relise YouTube Music Video Killer!
If you "print" the article they use a fixed width font and the indentation looks better. Helps to turn off the style sheet too.
Music, Parties and Booze - Three Startup Sites That Love to Party
Can someone kill stenchbench's account? He's a troll/spammer: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=stenchbench

-20 karma in 4 hours? Amazing.
Hi, anyone can help me with some questions regarding news agregator frameworks. I would like create or set up one here in Brazil.

1. Is it hard to develope a similar one to reddit? (I found PLIGG open source and Openserving, but I am a big fan of reddit simplicity)

2. How much would it cost do develope one? (To hire an programmer, implementation and maintance)

3. Is YC news using the same platform as reddit?

4. Thats all for now. Please any input is welcome.

5. I am not a hacker, so I really don't know if my questions sound a little bit silly.

Thanks already.
timg, We will prove to you that we are the best. Send me the infortion found on http://grabagooddomain.com/?q=node/3, and I will give you suggestions. If you use my suggestion you can pay us $100. Just this one time, you don't even need to make a deposit. This is to show you how certain we are that GrabaGoodDomain.com is better than computer programs or anyone else...
Allow it, maybe even default to it, but don't require or forbid.

Another approach is to require it, but allow an optional display name.
Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?
Interesting -- I just checked out what Amazon does, as a reference. Amazon uses email as the login. If you change your email address (and can't get into the old one), AND you forgot your password, you are SOL: you have to open a new account.

I guess that's the "lots of pain" part, but I don't blame them.
"Inspired by a childhood passion for paper dolls, Scandinavian born Liisa started drawing dolls and accompanying wardrobes, uploading them to Geocities. The personal page grew, evolving to Paperdoll Heaven in 2004."

Sounds as if the original founder WAS designing a product she needed herself. Personally I don't see how I could ever have turned a virtual doll-clothing venture into a success.
Time for event-driven SOA | Service-Oriented Architecture
Event-Driven Architecture Overview
BPM in 2007 and beyond (Business Process Management)
Getting things done... in web design
Email Management with Free Trial and Online Demo - eMail Manager
Sun aims for ultra-cheap cell phones (With JavaFX Internet Access)
Got Cash? You Can Loan Money Like a Big-Time Banker
Old media turns combative against new media
Startup Sets Out to Create Shoes 2.0
This describes me very well except for the email response time bit. I have an awful tendency to mull over my responses for days, editing and re-editing to get them "perfect", when I know I shouldn't. Anyone else have this?
Net encyclopedia to list all plants, animals
Online Advertising: So Good, Yet So Bad
Let the Phone Pick Up the Tab
SAP says new software on track (Targeting Smaller Business with web apps)
Photoshop Upgrade Is Overkill for Flickr
Web's Best Calendars
Some technical curiosity:

http://webpy.org/ (Reddit was developed with webpy)

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/TagSchema
http://www.diogoazevedo.com/2006/09/voce-conhece-os-diggs-nacionais/
http://www.thesamet.com/blog/2006/11/17/tutorial-how-to-implement-tagging-with-turbogears-and-sqlalchemy/
http://www.pui.ch/phred/archives/2005/04/tags-database-schemas.html

http://bukkuma.com/
I saw no mention of textpayme. Do they stand a chance against big players?
Ha ha :) Was there something really wrong with AJAX? I gues s these products are aimed at corporate drones who want AJAX for buzzword-compliance reasons, not because they actually know anything about it.
Ethics and success are (mostly) orthogonal.
I'm going to do something like this. I don't want to use Monk rankings though. Can you guys think of some other heirarchry I can use for the "levels"? Maybe star trek ranks like ensign?
the key, is that it limits the amount of information you need from the user to create a relationship with them.

getting an email address and password is the bare min you need to communicate with them.

in some cases, i have only requested an email address and then sent the password in the mail. this solves a number of problems and if the user just uses the password, then you can assure they have a somewhat secure one.
i really like it when it is the email address. then it is never taken, and i don't have to remember which one of my usual username variations i have to put in.

when it is the the mail address, this makes a strong case for also validating them, otherwise people can accidentally lock up other peoples address by misspelling their own mail address. i think a user will never switch mail accounts to get access to a site. and as the customer service person you will be reluctant to delete a stale account from a misspelling, only because somebody claims his address is blocked. so you better know in advance this cannot happen.
I would guess it's the date that will be printed on newsstand issues. I noticed some time ago that a lot of magazines post-date themselves, presumably because people are less likely to buy a magazine that's dated a week ago.
"[...] the YouTube founders are now set for life and count it as personal wealth."

Well, unless Google stock crashes. As anyone who has ever been to a casino knows, it's not your money until you've cashed in your chips -- at any time before that, it could all disappear.
The High Price of Getting Paid for Content
My problem is different. If I fail to respond to an email within the first few hours, I'll often forget to respond to it at all.

It's not that I'm mulling them over, it's that they get overridden by a new flurry of messages. It's hard to keep up.
Weebly, A YC company, closes a $650k Investment
Last.fm Launches Video - Aims To Be The MTV Of Web 2.0 Age
Entrepreneurs need to get a life - Los Angeles Times
I'd bet this describes most people on news.YC - after all, being a relatively new, non-mainstream site that focuses on written articles delivered electronically, it'll attract folks with half the qualities in this article right off the bat.

I'm more curious how many people have all these qualities, start a company, and then fail. That'll give me a better idea of what my true odds are. It's possible that there are lots of people with these 10 qualities, yet there are only a few people who cash out with multi-million-$ payouts.
There's always room for high-end processing software - avids instead of iMovie, photoshop instead of iPhoto or Aperature.

However, the incumbents always miss the boat when the market changes. You used to have to have PShop to do ANYTHING. Now you only need it to do the most sophisticated things.

But, snipshots, be aware: batch processing photos is where the market is!
I'm like that too, except I don't have the "flurry of new messages" excuse. More often, if I let it go when I first see it, it slips out of my mind. It's like "Well, it wasn't important enough to respond to the first time, what's different now that makes it important enough to respond to?" (regardless of whether it actually is important enough to respond to).
Comcast CEO Shows Off Super Quick Modem: Financial News
Command Lines: the next UI breakthrough?
I guess I don't quite see your point. What stops employees from organizing themselves (say using the web etc), electing someone to represent the group, and negotiating with the company. Lets say the group demands more pay, and the company says no. The employees go on strike, and the company is able to hire all new people. This means that the pay demand was beyond market levels and not an appropriate request. The flip side is the company is unable to find replacements, which would mean that the staff is underpaid, so they grant the raise. Going on strike at a company is an extremely damaging method of contract negotiation putting into jeopardy both the company and the jobs they provide. It is very risky and should only be done as a last resort. Either way, why would you need laws for this (other than current contract law, etc.)

Can you give an example of where the free market and current laws prevent voluntary group negotiation?
first off, where do you get the 99% effective statistic? I'm genuinely curious, because I cannot think of a reason why the simple addition test is effective at all; i am still as baffled as ever.

as for hired spammers, i don't see a protection against that, nor do i challenge your argument about it, but the subject is CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are turing tests; they tell computers from humans, not humans from humans. the difference is that botnets take very little money to run, once the software is mature. hiring takes money, and that in itself is a barrier. i don't know the true costs of running botnets vs hiring commenters; perhaps as you said, hiring is more cost-efficient, but it seems almost trivially easy to defeat the "2 + 3" mechanism, so trivial, that i would assume it to cost significantly less to defeat than hiring somebody even at 6 dollars per hour.

if the hired commenters post "intelligent" content, well then, it is, by definition, intelligent content. if "intelligent" only means "coherent" and "somewhat related to the topic of discussion," fine, it can be spam, but it still fits two criteria: 1. a human posted it, 2. it required mental effort to create. a legitimate user who is a maniac wouldn't fare any better. as such, i would believe that a hired commenter who posts "intelligent content" is as at least as intelligent as a nonhired user who posts "unintelligent content."
Jason, I don't get it. In what way is software not technology?
Apparently Weebly took YC financing after being featured on TC. I am pretty sure this creates a different mentality from the investor perspective, YC included.

If YC finances a rising company, as opposed to paper-idea company, they have a much better look at how the market is reacting; would it be fair to say that in this way, it is much easier to spot potential successes, and fund very much in the style of a normal VC, as opposed to early stage seed funding?

I would assume so. And if that's true, is it fair to say the Weebly would've done equally well without YC funding, and directly went for larger investments? Or was YC the stepping stone for that? And if so, how?
Agreed it would be much harder for you or me to develop this service, than it was for the founder who was inspired by her "childhood passion". But even Liisa is not a 10-17 yr old now.

The point really was about untapped opportunities. How often do we think about the needs of people different from us?
Lessons for Entrepreneurs: Ignoring Is Bliss and Then Some
One sure thing is that YC invests in companies that enables the average Joes (like me) to do things the simple way. It has to be dead simple to use (well I am sure there a few exceptions). I am not sure I would use Weebly, but it sure can help several people with little technical background. Does anyone knows if Weebly lets you use a custom URL?
Is that considered angel, or VC money?
the guy mentioned in this article sounds like a decent chap who is very focused on filling a need in an under served community but most of his ideas and insights are taken directly from "The E-Myth Revisited" by Michael Gerber.
"If you are selling a company, get a stock deal from the buying company and save a ton on taxes."

Another factor: consider the current stock price of the acquirer and how it relates to the company's intrinsic valuation (if you don't know enough to estimate intrinsic valuation, learn enough finance until you do). People who sold dot-coms in late '99 with a one-year lockup got screwed: their payout wasn't worth anything by the time they could sell, and oftentimes the acquirer was bankrupt by then. People who sold dot-coms in early '98 (Bo Peabody, and I think PG may be in this boat) made out handsomely. People who sold dot-coms in 2002 to strong, growing companies - assuming they could find any buyers - would have become filthy rich. If Friendster had taken Google's $30M offer back then, it would be worth close to $1B now.
Interesting. Is there normal version of this article? Without that stupid & useless flash-frame around it?
Going.com looks pretty impressive. And out of my town, Columbus, OH. Though ironically, it does not list Columbus as one of the towns in its list...

Does anyone know who the founders are?
The 99% effective statistic came from the author of codinghorror.com. His CAPTCHA for every comment is a single static image of the word "ORANGE" in a slightly stylized but plainly readable font. I've seen other bloggers claim that simple addition puzzles are almost 100% effective as well (at least, they were when they were introduced).

I think that spammers simply don't want to create a special case handling of every site they come across.

I think in less than 5 years, a botnet will be able to participate in discussions in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from humans. If a robot posts better-than-average commentary, do you care if it is a real human or not?
Ok! Never mind... I read it all wrong... They are not out of Columbus, OH... Jeez... I need to sleep :D
I just meant more that if someone was starting a streaming live video on the go startup. The technology I would be interested in seeing, is if they had developed a easily portable camera with persistant wireless connection.

I personally do not consider most software to be new technology, unless it has some especially innovative algorithm or something. But calling all software technology is just a matter of personal taste.
Paul Buchheit: When people don't know how to change something
Google Reader Now Available on Wii
Google Upgrades and Re-Launches Analytics
I have a related question, for the email system we're about to launch:
-should we enable OpenID before launch
- or should we integrate it later?
- or just forget about it? (unless bazillions of users request it)
VON Conference searching for startups and innovators
If you ever get into a situation where your site has over 50k users or so, you will see banned users switch email addresses to circumvent your security measures several times a day. I know I do, and my site only has 300k users.

The solution is to store banned IP's in your database, excluding massively-shared IP's like AOL, and check against this list during registration. I also keep a list of free proxies and prohibit people using those IP's from signing up.
Weebly challenges TypePad, WordPress
You can download the PDF from:
http://www.scribd.com/word/download/48387?extension=pdf

If you download it you can then use Foxit Reader or this online viewer:
http://view.samurajdata.se/
Techcrunch 20 Anoints Tech Expert: MC Hammer
New Thinkpad T61 and R61 released
Lots of new stuff on this one. The turbo memory seems like a very cool feature.
Depends on a few variables...Time frame for launching, ease of integration, etc, etc.

Ignoring those...
As a user of OpenID I would vote for enabling before going live (one less new account to create). I have typically noticed its the legacy sites (pre OpenID) that are integrating, whereas most new services looking to leverage the service have it ready for go-live.
My Google Analytics account looks not-remotely-overhauled... Any news on when this might launch?
"I'm more curious how many people have all these qualities, start a company, and then fail."

I think this is a poor metric. Individual projects fail all the time for no reason. What's more telling is the chance that you'll succeed big somewhere at some point. Part of being smart is trying lots of random stuff and failing or getting bored and doing something else.
I say require it. People always remember their email addresses... Because username conflicts abound, people use "fire-and-forget" usernames all the time.
It uses a nicer layout, font or something, so it's easier & faster to find email. Also, I know it works and is reliable. I don't know if the same is true about something new.
"Acquisitions that are done as stock swaps are obviously not the same as cash transactions. Public companies often use their stock as trading currency for acquisitions since it has no cash impact on their business. However, stock transactions dilute the value of other shareholders, sometimes significantly. In a rising stock market no one really notices because the steady share price increase masks the dilution."

He's probably repeating secondhand an explanation he didn't understand the first time, because he got some of the words right but didn't make any sense. Whether you buy a company with cash, stock, bonds, favors, or anything else, the point is to get more than you pay for. AOL swapped some stock for control of Time Warner -- their stock was overpriced, TW was (arguably) underpriced, and when everything settled, AOL shareholders had lost 80% of their investment instead of 99% of their investment.

Trading $250 million in stock for $250 million worth of someone else' company isn't something you have to 'hide' with an increasing share price (and why would the price go up, if the company is blatantly devaluing itself?). Dodge didn't think this through, and it shows.
Is scribd promising too much?
New Google Analytics Rocks the Proverbial Socks
Interesting. Perhaps spammers are just lazy -- if they aren't following the latest captcha techniques. I still find those examples incredible, but as long as they work, happy.

And to answer your question, no. When you play chess with a strong computer, or a living grandmaster, both are formidable opponents playing the same game. Talking to an educated person and a strong AI capable computer would be participating in the same discussion. (I don't know if this is objectionable but it makes perfect sense to me; if you see otherwise, do explain.)

However, if and when that happens, the world is going down a wildly different path, and that problem you point out will be a minor one, compared to some dramatic job cuts it will likely bring about and the businesses that it wipes out.
The new command line is closer to a textual representation of the GUI: it rewards imprecision and ignorance, and trades intuitive correctness 95% of the time for impossible obscurity the other 5% of the time.

And it's verbose: "List all the files in my current directory that in in '.txt'" isn't nearly as nice as "ls \.txt". Do we really need ad-supported fluff from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, when we still have bash?
Jajah, a VOIP Startup, closes $20millions C round. WOOOOOOW
Laying the Longest Wire on Earth (1996)
YC News. A Human RSS reader.
If you think about it YC News is nothing more than a RSS reader, but an intelligent one. Users search and find information all over the web (not only where you tell them because you sure do not know all the places where good info resides) and bring it to you. Nice. And all you RSS reader wants you to do is submit an interesting comment or story every now and then. Sweet.
101 links for the IT professional - easy but rewarding way to spend your time online
JavaFX Mobile: a new smartphone OS contender
How Ethical is the new Web 2.0 business model?
Emerging Markets Call For Novel Thinking, Not Just Basic Products
But... What if the command line interpreter gets smarter and understands concepts within your query. "Find all articles last week that mentioned Ycombinator" for example.

Machine conceptual awareness will be a big thing on the internet, but it is a HARD problem. We will then enter the world of Find engines instead of search engines.
The End of Mobile Social Web 1.0 and the death of Dodgeball
they are going to migrate everybody over the next month
A couple of years ago my mom, who is not very computer literate at all, asked me "why can't someone just invent a computer where you type in what program to run instead of hunting for menus and little pictures all the time?"

There was a movement for several decades that assumed that _everyone_ is visually oriented, but there are many people who are still language oriented. Not everyone likes just picture-books.
Seriously now, is this a business? Seems more like a project to me.
This is not Google bait. This solves no real problems.
R.I.P Flash Lite.
Do many people (outside of geekdom) use the Google commands, though? I use the calculator and units of measure, but generally don't know or bother with the others. My family doesn't know they exist, nor do most of my friends (except a couple who fall into the "geekdom" category).

I'd postulate that it was the adoption of the GUI that let the PC spread into the mainstream. Most people just don't have the patience to look up commands. Periodically, there are nostalgic pronouncements that the command-line will reign supreme again, but mostly this seems to be because the tech pundit population largely overlaps with the comfortable-with-computer-before-they-became-mainstream population.
i was not talking about security, but about usability.
That's a very nice article - an oldy but a goody.
Congrats to the Weeblys. I used Weebly for the first time about a week ago when I wanted to quickly put a page of info. It works well.
Teenwag is another human RSS reader http://teenwag.com
This author should hurry up and get outraged over Linux and the BSDs. Also, all of academia ought to be ashamed that it's fooled itself into publishing stuff for free: if you come up with a new theorem, you'd better slap a price tag on it!
Red Hat to build 'Global Desktop' - vnunet.com
Quicksilver is a very successful example of a new variation on the command line paradigm. Lots of the power but without the annoyance and specificity.
Do you do math that way, too? "Consider a matrix with, like, a lot of elements. Okay? Now flip it around so this one element is where the other element was and the other element is where this other element was, and..."

There's nothing wrong with expressing a vague idea vaguely, but if you're definitely looking for definite information, you should use whatever method gets you exactly what you're after. If you chain together enough 90%-right assumptions, your probability of getting a wrong conclusion approaches 1.
I guess you're assuming extremely ambiguous english queries, and I'm assuming a good english query similar to my example. With a bad english query, you'll get bad results guaranteed. This is true for both humans trying to understand what you're saying, and for the poor computer trying to determine conceptual context. GIGO

For mathematical formulas and formal queries, the user would need to use formal notation.
Ethics? Of the web? Blogga, PLEASE.
Looks like Valleywag is browsing news.yc for story ideas too.