skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really admire his obsessive dedication to improving the technology! No wonder he was such an exceptional founder. Find what you are good at and make ourself a million times better than anyone else at it. An inspiration.
I think he lifted the title from the blog itself.
Maybe roughly 4-5x dilution. I'm not sure if Bechtolsheim was the very first funding they had. 2m would be a high valuation for a seed round.
I like it (the web site and the "feel" of the product-- didn't try the product, but I'd like to).

I'd get a copywriter to review your site (one who specializes in persuasive writing for the web). The value prop is clear, but if you're selling language, you ought to nail your message. Phrases like "quickly gain thousand+ words", "ingolingo is the steroid of learning language", and "When he's not practising martial arts, he's at a social event talking with other clever people" are awkward.

While I like it, the design feels a tad soft/feminine (why the flowers?) - what are the demographics of people who want to learn new languages? Might be interesting to ponder color psychology... Is the design/color selection based off of what you guys like? Or what the target audience will respond to? I dunno the right answer, but it's worth pondering.

Out of curiosity, why isn't the app web-based? You probably have access to these stats, but I'd be interested in how many referrers you got from YCNews and what percentage of them downloaded your app and tried it? I bet that percentage would double if it was web-based.

It's nitpicky, but I'd adjust your brown link color in the footer... Hard to recognize as a link.
Once you lose credibility...
What YC does, we have to do in person. Kind of like a university. So founders have to at least be able to get here for the 3 months. They could return to their home country after that, but they'd be more likely to succeed if they stayed in the US-- partly because it's a better environment for startups, and partly because it would be easier for us to help them.
When taking a place on a six month contract with it to run on with two months' notice thereafter, I've made up for the lack of "normality", i.e. no employer salary cheque, etc., by paying the six months rent up front and then reverting to the normal monthly rent payment. Every landlord so far has agreed. It may help to think of ways you can persuade a landlord, and often than means paying more money (the interest I lost -- not much).
It is? I am in Germany and I was actually wondering if it would be possible to get insurance from a foreign insurance company. The "public health insurance" is REALLY expensive for me (500/month), but I don't see a way out.
So how does flashlite manage to support all devices bug free? Do they just have better quality checks? Like phone might have differing sound chips or whatever, the VM has to account for it. Somehow I doubt that flashlight will be so much more successful than Java with portability?

Actually I think you can deploy Java on all Java devices, if you heed certain constraints. But then the application probably won't look very good and will lack some usability features (ie maybe you wouldn't use the soft-keys for navigation or you wouldn't use fullscreen mode, and no sound).

A big problem of mobile Java is the inconsistent font support, though - maybe if flashlights has better standards, it would be a huge improvement. With Java, you don't know how the fonts really look, and measuring the fonts dimensions is usually unreliable, too. So creating a decent layout is really difficult...
Virtualmin (a YC company) has a new website, feedback wanted
Astroturf? Only real post on a freshly minted blog. No information to substantiate who this person is.
Location. Location. Location: Get the Best Out of 3 Presence Apps
The startup world is riddled with well built products that nobody wants and highly capable teams building those products.

If you take it for granted that the primary definition of a great product is one that lots of people want, as opposed to one that it well built, then you're already ahead of the game :-).
Walt Mossberg's iphone video review - "A beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer"
Looks like it: http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html

Larry and Sergey's Charlie Rose interview is a bit unclear, because Larry talks about getting that check from a "David Sheridan" or "Sheraton", one of the "founders of Sun". I think he may have mixed up Andy with the Stanford faculty member at whose home they met.

The only other occurrence I see of "David Sheraton" is here:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0407/14/i_ins.01.html

Charlie Rose interview:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6958201596441974119 (40 minutes in)
2 good markets for a startup, which would you choose?
Based on Marc A's last blog post, if you had a good team, good product and 2 good markets, what criteria would you use to select which market to focus?
In reference to: http://www.iunknown.com/2007/06/steve-yegge-por.html

Steve Yen already did it years ago!

Kind of. The code looks pretty brief.
Exercising is the only non-work activity which helps people work harder? Maybe for you -- not for me. I play violin and go to symphony concerts; that keeps me calm enough that I can think through what I'm doing rather than rushing off and going nowhere fast.
Roundup: Apple iPhone Reviews
Facebook is having an enormous lifestyle impact on current college students. It's a sociological shift. Most of my peers are so attached to facebook that the extraordinary valuations for facebook seem perfectly reasonable.
I'm not sure I'm being that strange :-). At a certain point it just becomes a semantic debate, but let's try:

- Product -- the thing that gets built. Let's assume there is one customer/user of it who finds it relevant to his needs. That customer/user is evaluating it on how fast it is, how reliable it is, how many features it has, how extensible it is, what platform it runs on, how easy to use it is, how polished the UI is, etc. That's that customer's view of product quality.

- Market -- how many users/customers are there going to be like that? A dozen, a hundred, a thousand, a million, a billion? How hard is it going to be to get to those customers? How much will it cost to acquire them as users/customers? How long will it take them to use/buy? That's the market question.

Yes, you're right, the point is that you need to make something that people want (or, more precisely, that lots of people want, if you want leverage).

Yet the Valley and the industry is filled, and has been filled for 30 years, with very smart people building great products (as defined above) for very small markets.

The classic example is the huge universe of ISV's for marginal platforms. Ask anyone who tried to succeed as an ISV for the NeXT box, BeOS, the Amiga, etc. what the difference is between a high-quality product and a great market, and they'll certainly be able to tell you. Hell, most (not all, but most) Mac ISV's had this exact problem over the last 20 years.

I see this kind of thing all the time in this industry.
Close!

Only a very small number of people wanted Game Neverending.

A very large number of people wanted Flickr.

Huge difference.

Flickr much simpler product.
Yes!

I'd add two things:

+ It doesn't necessarily take more effort to build a product that lots of people want vs a product that very few people want.

Again, sounds obvious, but I see lots of startups exercising huge effort to build complex products against very small markets.

+ We all suffer from hindsight bias -- for every Apple, Microsoft, 3M, and HP, there are thousands of companies that screwed up the progression you're talking about and failed that we've never heard of.
Yes, agree on all fronts.

At any given time in the startup world, there are "hot" markets as perceived by entrepreneurs and VCs that look like they'll be huge that won't be.

And there are markets that don't look "hot" at all that will ultimately be huge. Search keyword advertising was like this -- when Overture first came out, most people (including me) thought they were nuts.

Sometimes you get the "hot" market that turns out to be huge. That's a nice situation.

Then there's the fourth category -- un-hot markets that turn out to be tiny. There are a LOT of those :-).
Yes -- I think my use of the term "red-hot" was misleading -- in my post I meant "huge and growing".

Agree with second point also -- big markets often get a lot bigger, and provide a lot of opportunity to new entrants. And sometimes they're heavily hyped along the way.
10 Developers For The Price Of One
They won't be able to make enough of these things... it's an amazing device.

Folks, start creating apps for it... pretty much everyone I know that has a web2.0 company is making sure they have something that works well on an iPhone.
Google Scalability Conference Trip Report: Lessons in Building Scalable Systems
Google Scalability Conference Trip Report: Scaling Google for Every User
Eric Enge interviews Seth Godin
If they sell 2 million of the $500 devices, Apple will have a new billion-dollar business. If they sell as they claim, 10 million, that is $5B per year added to Apple revenue.

However I expect that Apple stock will not grow until Leopard ships, losing the Mac business in favor of the tough cell phone business would not be seen as a good tradeoff.
I did not expect to be impressed but wow... that thing looks amazing. Nicely done apple. This will easily add another bill$ to their business.
Why not the Rails to JavaScript port by another Steve...

http://code.google.com/p/trimpath/wiki/TrimJunction
Looks interesting, my girlfriend is actually trying to learn French since we plan to move there, but being Windows only means we can't use it. I don't believe in making everything a web app, but in this case it would seem ideal... is there a reason you chose to make it a Windows app?
I was a little disappointed when I read this tidbit in the article: "The only add-on software Apple is allowing will be Web-based programs that must be accessed through the on-board Web browser. The company says these can be made to look just like built-in programs, but the few we tried weren't impressive."

Is this a comment on the particular apps Walt saw, or is it a sign that the iPhone won't be a good 3rd party platform?
+ For sufficiently side-effect-/IO-excluding values of "any".
Thanks for the considered feedback. I modded you up even though I don't have enough design sense to know whether your advice is good or bad.
The only way to create apps for an iPhone, for now at least, is through the web standards. Frankly, I don't mind this at all since our app is a web app and we don't need access to local resources.

From what we managed to figure out on our own, the key is to make sure your app works well in Safari (duh!) and to make sure you optimize fonts and layout for iPhone's resolution 480x320 (it has a very high DPI count though). We made a custom CSS for an iPhone for our "Edit" screen. Also, to make it easy to zoom in on certain portions, iPhone's Safari is zooming in on individual DIVs so splitting your front page into more DIVs sounds like a great thing.... you won't notice this on regular browser but it will allow you to have a nice zoom on an iPhone.

PS: We're more excited about this than about F8 platform. First few apps that come out with "support" for iPhone will get a lot of free publicity and a lot of users.
The site is most useful for photos that help tell a story, e.g. of travels, or of kids growing up. My private family site is on there, and chronicles our doings over the past several years. The name wouldn't fit the timeless artistic photos you find on webshots or flickr, but that's not what this site is for.

Glad you mostly like the logo. I might at some point make it more prominent on the front page. On people's sites within ourdoings.com, I plan on leaving it less prominent. I want them to feel ownership. Having my logo take the primo real estate of the upper left corner would not serve that purpose.

A novel about design might not serve me well, since I don't have enough design sense to tell what advice to accept/reject. If there's a basic, obvious principle or two I've violated, I might actually fix it if you tell me specifically. Design isn't likely to be my highest priority any time soon, though.
This is very useful feedback; I wish I could mod you up twice. I'll put it at the top of my list of gaining-new-customers features. Making existing customers happy is higher priority, though, and I have a few things on that list to get out of the way.
What if I actually like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? - (37signals)
On flickr, as on almost every photo-sharing site out there, you have to decide how to organize your photos into albums. When you have kids, some photos don't fit neatly into one or another album, and you spend too much time deciding. Letting the timestamps do the organizing for you is a big win for people who don't want to spend time organizing. No, it isn't groundbreaking technology, but it's worth bragging about to people who have photos to share but don't have time to organize them.

The email feature is great for keeping friends up-to-date with what you've been doing. When you email a link, there's a decision people have to make as to whether they should look now or later. With embedded thumbnails they can see at a glance how interesting your latest photos are to them. I use the feature to keep up with old friends and former coworkers, as well as family, and it's the feature that generates the most excitement.

There are sites out there that spam your friends after you invite them to see your private album, and sites that don't give you access to the full-size photos you've uploaded, so those features are worth mention. If the bulleted list distracts from the main distinguishing features, do you think I should just make "other features" a link to a separate page?

I'm definitely not trying to beat flickr at its own game. Still, I am trying to find the right niche. Parents like ourdoings.com when I show it to them, but I still haven't found the market where people's hair is on fire.
If there's enough interest in your photos that you could make nontrivial money from ads near them, then you're not in my target market. Skilled artistic photographers are well-served by existing photo-sharing sites. This one is for photos whose value is in the story they tell.
You're getting the idea. There are millions of people out there whose photos sit on their hard drive, never to see the light of day. The early-adopter types are well served by flickr, pbase, smugmug and others.
Thanks that's very helpful. I always seem to fall on number 2 and 3. The occasional 1 pops up every now and then..
If you ever took a hundred kid photos and tried to organize them into albums on a non-automatic photo-sharing site, you'd understand why I emphasize "automatically."

I used to think "amazing" was useless marketingspeak until I saw reddit stories succeed or fail based on the word. Yes, simple is absolutely what I emphasize. Yes, the purpose is to share photos. It isn't a social networking site for photography enthusiasts like flickr, etc.; it's a simple way to share photos.

I realize I am not a designer. I'm poor enough at it that I might not recognize good design if I saw it, except in terms of usability. That aspect of the site will have to wait. Luckily, people seem to get a positive experience when attention is drawn to content they're interested in, and the current default style accomplishes that.
Agreed which could possibly pave the way for offline apps.
Each time I've made changes in response to news.yc feedback, though not necessarily yours.

I did mod your first comment up and did no downmodding, since I read sincere feedback and it's obvious you did at least look.
Overall it's extremely nice. Some unfiltered random things that I thought:

+ So much text on the front page I didn't read any of it.

+ The favicon "fit into" the logo. Trivial, but pleasing.

+ The first thing I wanted to see after screenshots was the demo, but I only found that by scrolling to the bottom.

+ The demo seems to be on a slow machine or something because it's not very responsive and the UI graphics (rounded corner GIFs) loaded slowly (no keepalives?).

+ The quote "Your software kicks ass!" seems a little risque for your intended audience. It stood out to me at least.

+ "Docs" navigation option made me thing of Google Docs & Spreadsheets which through me off.

+ Navigation links are a bit non-standard and seem unimportant because of their size.
From what I can tell, a lot of people are a tad confused by the fact that you have to use Javascript to interface with the iPhone.. A lot might think that it's a crippled interface. But Apple can expose every single part of the phone to Javascript. Add in the ability to create an icon on the iPhone that automatically visits a website, and you have, for all intents and purposes, a native application running on the iPhone. So I'm not sure why people feel that it's a crippled platform.

Now, if Apple doesn't expose every single part of the iPhone to Javascript, then that's a little annoying. But then again, I wouldn't want a random web application to be able to take a picture and upload it whenever it felt like.
I grew up using the above technologies. And I do love them to bits(Although I get lazy coding HTML and CSS every now and then) After reading the entry more deeply I can't help to think this post is about DHH's relunctance to use Flex + Rails technology. http://flexiblerails.com/

Granted I love Rails but still use Perl and PHP to code most of my apps, I'm not too keen either to learn Flex at this point in time(depending on my mood anyway).
The only problem with that idea is performance. Javascript the language is not necessarily slow, but almost all modern implementations are. I suppose the saving grace is that multitasking isn't exactly common on a phone, but even still I can see it being a problem. What about games, for example? Anything beyond Sudoku is going to have problems.
Yeah, and even if a client-based app is necessary, I wouldn't advertise that it's a 10-minute download.

On the internet, that sounds like an eternity.
A few thoughts:

- too much text.

- it isn't immediately obvious to me what the differentiators are for your product vs. competition

- Brighten up the site. Your audience may be technical, but that doesn't necessarily mean we don't like colour. Of course, these things are subjective.

- might want to make the screenshot even larger - or zoom into an interesting feature. Visuals break up the page and draw the eye.

+ the quote at the top is good

- you say 'the four best ways to manage your server' and then make the user search thru a paragraph of text to figure out what you mean. Call the 4 ways out with more emphasis..

- don't think you need the 'The New Virtualmin.com' section. It's like a sausage maker boasting about improvements to their factory... Perhaps you could make better use of that space by focusing on the product.
- Use more visuals - perhaps to highlight the top 3 features of your product

There are more positives than I have mentioned but calling out what needs to be improved would probably be of more use to you.
I don't know if it is a conflict with one of my firefox extensions, but when I type a letter, it gets in the box, but also starts the firefox quick search. Every letter after that only goes into the quick search. So to write a word I have to click on every single box. Definitely annoying. But again, could just be a conflict on my machine. That's firefox 2.0.0.4 on gentoo linux
Even at MIT I never met anyone who could work productively beyond 55-60 hours a week for extended periods. Beyond 60 hours a week, one is merely displacing true friends with coworkers for many social activities, such as going out for dinner, coffee or discussing the news.

There is a balance that is lost - no TV; random, lazy Saturday afternoons are a luxury; spontaneous get togethers with friends are no longer so practical. But friends and other activities don't have to be sacrificed, merely structured into one's routine.
Review: Don't Get "Hung Up" on Buying an iPhone (You should wait for the next version)
Sorry. I'm just not that impressed. When I saw the web site, I was excited by the prospect of a "better" language teaching tool. But the UI is pretty bad and I'm doubtful of some of the claims you make.

For example, you mention that you teach the "most common" words first. I tried learning a little French, and two of the first few words were bucket and farm. Seriously, I think "Donde esta la biblioteca" was more useful....
Good luck to snipshot in getting a boost from being early in the list. If they had been farther down they would be buried among too many sites, a lot of them as obscure as mine or moreso.
Clean look. Good fonts and colors. But way too much text. I'd guess you could (thus should) cut three quarters of the words on the page. Also, it's not clear enough that the screenshot is a screenshot: it looks like a form on the page.
I smell MBA's everytime I see that gobig site. They're like cops pretending to be drug dealers. The lingo is all wrong and they're a little too eager...
Review: The iPhone Matches Most of Its Hype (The iPhone is amazing. But no, it's not perfect.)
Cheriton. He invested too.
Thanks! I've wondered about that since I saw the interview. Looks like he got 1% also.

"Cheriton is also credited for setting up Stanford students Sergey Brin and Larry Page with money men at Kleiner Perkins, thus becoming one of the early investors that helped get Google off the ground." (Wikipedia)

Silicon Beat says, "He'd invested in Google as part of the angel round."
Vivisection?
Don't take this the wrong way because I'm downloading the software and I'm interested (I really don't normally bother dling stuff): how on earth did you conceive this as a desktop application? Seriously. Its begging to be a web application, begging for it.

(Oh and now its installing .NET grrr)
I'm more skeptical.

1) How will webapps perform when they have to do a stream of http requests over a cingular wireless connection.

2) The people willing to pay 600 bucks for a phone are the people that already own smart phones. The people that own smartphones will not like typing out emails on a touch screen. These people want a device to let them read and enter text quickly, and often they want to type without seeing the screen.
ycsearch.com
I put this together quickly to search yc sites with google cse and found it helpful after using it for a few weeks. In response to discussions at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30912, I hope you will find it useful until pg implemented the search feature.
"I have come to realize that very little goes right the first time."

Never go in against a German when a $10B market is on the line!
The "google doesn't offer a career path" point didn't necessarily sound as bad as they were probably assuming: given the choice between moving in to management if you're good at coding, or being paid more to do what you presumably enjoy, I know a lot of people who would prefer the latter.

Not a cut-and-dried issue I know, but I suspect it betrays a certain set of assumptions if not a mentality.
Basically I like it, but it could be more user-friendly, communicating what you do with significantly less cognitive load.

Needs a tagline with the logo - tell me very quickly what it is you do. Could even use the intro sentence "[Virtualmin is] the world's most powerful and flexible webserver administration tool" as tagline.

You could then use the main textblock to make the the product's essential features bolder and simpler to grok; less paragraphy, more bullet-pointy.

I would also minimise the bottom bits into link+sentence and make them clearer/brighter. Sell the product in the main block: you don't need to sell the links to the demo/video with whole paragraphs, just present them clearly.

Off the main page, you need some whitespace at the bottom of the landing pages (buy & download). At the moment the footer is squashing the text.