skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of my life I would have agreed wholeheartedly. I still agree, but it's nuanced now. For the past while I've been growing a property management business on Maui, and I've discovered a demographic that the moment you say anything close to "sorry," you see them transform- they see dollar signs and suddenly they become monsters. We've had to enact a policy at our company- if you ask someone how their stay has been and they say "well, it rained a few of the days," whatever you do, _don't_ say "yah, sorry about that- too bad," even though that's the most natural thing in the world to say. If we ever said sorry to something like that some would immediately demand a refund for their stay (funny as that sounds). Only apologize for things that really are your fault. "Sorry, my fault" are magical words only when they are true (both parts). Turns out pretty much every hotel and property management in Hawaii has a "black list"- customers who they will not give a room to. Thankfully it doesn't happen nearly as often in tech. Corollary: trust your customer.
Dude, you're not right at all. There are a lot more opportunities for a PhD although there are many for a BA too. You don't have to be a physics professor if you get a PhD.
Here's one: get newlines working. Either allow <br /> elements or translate the newline before applying the comment. It'll make the comments a lot more readable. I know it can be abused, but I don't think that's really a worry in this forum. You can always turn it back off later, right?
i think this is sort of a goofy post, but i like comment #2 quite a bit.
OK, here's the question, pg, is this site actually running on a lightweight webserver written in ARC, or did you tie ARC into apache or something for the application logic and storage? Or did you use ARC as a markup language? Just curious.
Adobe's take on new video editing tools at Photobucket
'... Nobody at a social news site has yet figured out how to do the RSS feed right, IMO ...'

How about RSS feeds for individual users comments? Who likes checking into 'roach motels'? I don't. The number of sites I've added content /., use.perl, perlmonks, reddit only a few allow you to extract *your* insight.

'... RSS feeds are low-priority. ...'

possibly true, but why should you have to go back to a site/page when you can just grab the data & use it as you like?
Start this trend, please:

TWO sets of arrows.

The first set indicates: Yes, I agree, or No, I don't agree.

The second set is only ONE arrow, pointing down. This means, "This comment is spam/offensive/offtopic."
rumors != useful
You could be a post-doc for 12 years until some professorship opens up in the Golan Heights. If you don't want to stay in Physics the only thing a Ph.D. is useful for is a "change career free card". You're allowed to change your career to anything but only once.
I thought this article was about how Flex was the favored technology for RIAs (as opposed to AJAX).
A newspaper chain tries to innovate... looks painful.
OK, this is my first post. I had already read this elsewhere earlier today, but funny that it's the first thing I've read after joining! I have been doing Avid tech support for over 10 years (Avid is the industry standard software for editing video/film - although that is being threatened strongly) I have been waiting for this to happen. Was wondering when someone would jump on the idea of providing in-browser editing tools for the "YouTube" crowd. Avid's a fool not to embrace this... Anyway, I want to jump in soon with the whole video on the web experience. I hope to update everyone soon over time on what my ideas are... Hope all are well and good luck!
PBWiki Raises $2m
I guess it must be just me, but I think onstartups.com articles have close to zero content.
I would love a save feature... I someone already said this and I missed it, my bad. I check sites like this often while I have a quick minute at work, but if I notice a really good article I want to read I don't always have time. I would like to save it so at the end of each evening I could log in just to read over things I thought looked interesting. I do this in reddit all the time, and expect that I would like doing the same here.
The first item is a verbose way of saying "Six Sigma."
Google PowerPoint Clone Coming
I'd like to see the source code, or at least a part of it, to see what Arc looks like in action.
Not logging users out when we restart the server. (If you
find yourself suddenly logged out, that's why. Sorry, will fix.)
a list of all of a user's comments on their user page would be nice
You can master your choice of ideas, technology, location. But stuff up the soft side of tech-startups (founder commitment) and you are doomed. The article has an interesting take on working out the dividing line between founders that are *involved* VS those who are *committed*. But is this a good enough test?

I found out recently the distinction between 'involved' & 'committed' when a co-founder ditched out prefering to do a Phd (in the exact same area of the product) rather go the hard yards, build a product then sell it. Why? I can only guess. The Phd route could be perceived as less risky, higher prestige over the entrepreneurial route. Maybe because all the "chicks dig Phd's in CompSci" ?

Using the above test the co-founder would pass. So how do you, "evaluate if a co-founder is committed over the entire product development timeline before any perceived payback" ?

The article fails to answer this question.
I second that, I love the minimalist approach. Reddit was much like that in the beginning.
Had a look, read. One thing that struck me was the harsh unnecessary division between VC, Angel & Startup articles. If I'm a startup I might want to read about Angels? Looks like an aggregator for startup blogs, so there is some form of authenticity. The site is very hard to read but nothing that could not be solved with design make over.

Good to see some reddit posters here 'bio'. Enjoyed reading your posts.
OK everyone, so what is Web 3.0 (or Enterprise 2.0 or whatever)? My bet is on xulrunner type highly responsive local apps with persistent connections to the server (which is possible with something like yaws, not really with apache). Kind of a client-server model where the server is Internet based (though, of course, no one will dare say the words client-server).
It's possible to make a site simpler and more straightforward for users by making it prettier. Really good web design is very subtle; things like giving small but definite visual cues for where posts begin and end, or making the "reply" link a slightly different color from the post so it doesn't look like part of the post -- these small changes do more than look pretty, they also lower the cognitive load on the user and make it feel simpler.

A lot of what Reddit has been doing to their interface has been tiny changes that make it feel simpler. Good web design is something to be appreciated; great web design makes you forget that it's even there.
Applications open for summer 2007 YC funding
See http://ycombinator.com/s2007.html for details. The application form lives at http://news.ycombinator.com/apply.
Probably time to make urls in comments turn into links.
MoMB | The Museum of Modern Betas
Want to beta Apollo, Adobe's next-gen framework?
there are no right or wrong choices. I find this an interesting post as I just commented on the 'involved' vs 'committed' post ~ http://tinyurl.com/2q9ut8 where a co-founder left to pursue a PhD from a startup. The key test is are they *both committed*? I also noted the potential motivators, '... no money, no job, no health insurance, and no idea if we are actually going to succeed ...', '... started counting the number of girls I would interact with on a daily basis ...'. While their situation may/may not improve on all these points the fact they are committed is a step in the right direction. Now if only I could search for AMD64 ~ http://octopart.com/search?q=AMD64
Awesome. Been checking the site five times a day for months. :)

BTW the ASCII application has a few dates off. Looks like a copy/paste issue from the last application.
IPO fever returns?
Why are you reluctant to accept one person companies? One person is often sufficient for a workable prototype. Others can join later. In fact, Y Combinator can act as a match maker of sorts, encouraging mergers among similar proposals/prototypes.
Yes everyone I know has bailed from reddit. Too many alarmist political , Bush bashing, boring articles. Not enough interesting tech links.
My little startup: a discussion group for every city in the world
Definitely search. I use reddit's search feature all the time to find old articles.
Maybe you should make it so you don't have to log in to read comments? Some people might not realize how easy it is to create an account...
Wow...I was pulling for XUL to replace the Ajax mess we have today, but this Flex thing looks like a serious contender. What a concept: sane, debuggable webapps that look slick, too!
Designing web forms: efficient label placement
Top 7 indicators of consumer internet success (Startup Review)
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
1. Single Founder
Such a thing would be far more useful than the other online docs in my opinion. I can't remember if I've attended a power point presentation that didn't have technical problems of some sort.
ad "7. Story that lends itself to mainstream PR":

Dabble Db used Smalltalk as initial marketing vehicle, so maybe "Story that lends itself to fringe (with fanatical users) PR" could also be a valid strategy...
Brad is definitely my biggest technical role model by far. A completely open source stack: Linux, Perl (Apache mod_perl), MySQL. Besides creating LiveJournal he created Memcached, Perlbal, MogileFS, and OpenID which power some of the biggest sites (even competitors which he is happy about). He probably holds the record for scaling on the cheap. He's also unbelievably steadfast in doing right by his users. He has lost a lot of control since selling to SixApart, but he's still working hard. His blog is super great reading for wanna-be's like me: http://brad.livejournal.com/

The way he tackles technical issues is inspiring as hell, he says "there should be X" and then hammers away non-stop until it exists.
Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution (book)
Criteria for Web 2.0 Investment
It seems like a lot of this information is pulled directly from Cal's book "Building Scalable Web Sites" (Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Scalable-Web-Sites-Applications/dp/0596102356/). If you are interested in gaining some of the spoken context behind the slides, this is a great read. It was reviewed on slashdot a while back (http://books.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/26/1357210).

If your venture is a site that is going to eventually need to scale due to high resource consumption from individual users (whether this be storage, CPU, or database requirements) I suggest you pick up a copy of this book to know how to better address this concern during design rather than in deployment!
I'd like to see a list (RSS feed?) of my comments that have been replied to so that discussion can continue.
Hey Andres, Major Life Decisions aside, I gotta say that Octopart sounds like a pretty smart idea! Perhaps the first so-called vertical search engine that's really piqued my interest. Don't know anything about the market or competition, but on the surface it seems like a solid niche -- not a market that Google's going to go after anytime soon -- in a growth industry. And isn't hardware hacking, open source hardware, etc. supposed to be the Next Big Thing? (Tim O'Reilly's been talking about this a lot lately.) Anyways, just wanted to lend a word of support to help you tune out all the haters. Good luck!
A new bookmarking site needs a 'Hello World' link. Can I claim I meant for this to become the 'suggestions' thread?
Agreed. I distinctly remember -- and am sad to admit -- having to get around annoying font disparities by screen capturing parts of my slides and pasting them as images. Go figure.
startup review of HOTorNOT
Damn it Paul, you beat me to it. I slapped together a reddit clone last summer in reaction to its diluting startup content, but I went on to travel for a month and have been procrastinating from finishing it up ever since. Nevertheless, I really appreciate that you are opening this to public.
Bare bones API-like stuff could go a long way. Add a url parameter to the submit page that prefills the url field and anyone can create a bookmarklet for submitting. Add a status page that takes a url and returns whether or not it is in the system, its current rating and the id to pass in for modding and someone's on their way to a low rent firefox extension.
Google Apps Premier
so at a first glance, the list of features seems to mostly be about better support and gmail features.
>I up-voted a comment by mistake and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove my vote

It'd also be nice to have ajax for voting, so we don't have to re-scroll to find where we left off.
Though restricting the site to invitation only isn't a good idea.
Letting people invite friends that they know would be interested
from inside the site would be convenient.
Paul there seems to be a bug. I've been just entering some stuff in the application and it seems it forgets the answers that I entered for the last few questions. It also seems to be truncating answers. I entered 1 month and it truncated that to 1 mon. Is there a restriction to the length of the entire application?
Sounds like a good plan - putting together a wiki of unsuccessful startups and their lessons. Anyone read Boohoo? the story of Boo.com?
This is more a content issue but to really build the community is have more fully fledged profiles - with location, bio - make it one or two lines max and a website or blog link. If we are what we think/read then it would be a great starting point in finding cofounders or people who are on the same wavelength.

I would also agree on seeing the latest comments - and maybe highlighting posts which you've commented on/ or submitted showing if there were new comments that you haven't read. So show "7 comments | 3 new" so it would be easy to come back to your home page and see how the discussion has evolved.
Archive at Trizoko - some pretty interesting startup articles
"Allen Morgan said that people have started forgetting that building a company takes at least 5 years."

That seems awfully long. If the goal is to sell the startup before it becomes "a company", won't the average time be quite shorter?
Paul, in that instance as a way to identify smart people it makes a lot of sense for it not to be invite only.

But it has triggered my thinking about how to create dense communities around diverse knowledge areas. So it would be cool to do this with scientific papers and get people to register with university email addresses to generate trust and preserve fidelity. I know digg and reddit are pretty mainstream but allowing people to create specific knowledge networks on this platform would be cool. Where its an industry group or networking organisation it would be a great way to pool knowledge and if need be preserve the value of the information by requiring users to be trusted by at least one person.
Perhaps you have heard of www.craigslist.org
http://www.miketaber.net/articles/TheSingleFounderMyth.aspx
Cool, I'll be interested in people's opinions here. I've been unable to determine how much of Apollo will required/be based on Flash, or if it's entirely HTML/Javascript. I just can't seem to get into Flash-based UIs, as nice as they can be. Something about them seems very constricting to me, as if I'm not really using the web anymore.
It's too bad. Javascript-in-the-browser and Ajax are both nasty hacks that force programmers to do all sorts of shameful things. And the result is--wanky html tricks. Java, for its faults, is fairly clean when run in the applet environment. It has every superiority over JITBAJAX, except for install issues and a chunky load process. Yahoo games seems like just about the only applet success story.

Of course, back in the day, non-trivial Applets tended to be too large for the dial-up accounts people had. At least that is changed.
Do you really have to think about the Web in discreet chunks to talk about the future? Besides if you really want to define "web 2.0" (which always maybes me shudder) its more about the average person contributing content; it's not about the technology that enabled it.
Even Billboards Are Dynamic...Why Is Your Website Set In Stone?
Good article and informative comments. They underline my own current concerns - working on a startup while working full-time to support a family... I know chances for success are slim because most would say I'm not "committed". But I have faith in my idea, and I keep working toward my goals. I get discouraged when I see other startups with similar ideas, but that also shows me that I'm on the right track and the market is ripe.
i think the hirers forgot that they are also being interviewed. not one of them seemed to feel that they needed to do anything other than allow the anointed one through the front door.
that being said, it seems as though each person selects people based on a wide range of criteria - i think the portfolio idea is probably the best, especially if other good programmers say they're good. Q is doing open source work the equivalent of building a portfolio with the benefit of allowing other programmers to rate your stuff?
Amichail, I know exactly what you mean. Some people work better on their own. But even if you're looking for a founder, there are some places where you're out of luck. I go to the University of Virginia, and to tell you the truth, it's nearly impossible to find good hackers to work on startups with (even though 50% of Reddit went here). And without that, there's no hope getting into something as prestigious as the YCombinator.

I propose we make a simple site that allows hackers find one another, locally. A single hacker isn't going to make a Meetup group to find other hackers; that takes too much work. It should be more like Craigslist, but for this startup community. Sorted by city, people can exchange email addresses, screen names, and most importantly, ideas.

All it takes is two founders, and you never know what kind of matches people will find.

Granted, they should know that they can work together before taking on a huge project, but I think that something of this sort will really help people discover one another and get their startups going.

I'm not suggesting we re-invent Craigslist, but there are enough people here to merit something like this. Ruby on Rails, anybody?
Paul Graham has backpedaled from one of the initial goals of Y Combinator, funding companies with no lower-bound for the age of founders.

With the publication of this essay, http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html, he has backpedaled from that stance because of his personal moral culpability for encouraging people to become drop-outs. So if you are seeking Y Combinator funding and are a current undergraduate, tell Paul Graham that you are dropping out to start the company regardless of whether or not he funds you.
Notes from Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter
Easiest and Most Intuitive Feed Reader, Feednut.com
hey omarish - i'm in on this. Shoot me an email. Sumon [at] zintilla [dot] com
Does anyone have a link to a video of this presentation?
There are plenty of girls if you're willing to make the drive to Berkelely
Actually, why not do it here? I bet that sort of functionality could be integrated somehow into this site, and from Paul's first post to the group on the reasons for the site I think it would fit in well.

Then again you won't be able to use Ruby...
yeah if we fill out the profiles - and add a location and status field. It'll work pretty well at first - as you can browse people's profiles to see if they are also looking for a co-founder etc. Things can then be taken up on email
Very good idea. We can assume most people here are in the startup community.

So perhaps there should be a search by location field on a page here so that people can find each other.
We'd like to see a geographic search so that founders can meet other founders based on where they live.

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=445
Bandwagon Launches--Use Amazon S3 service to back up ITunes libraries
This is a cool service--I'm using it now to back up my 8GB music collection. Runs in the background on my Mac.

The cooler thing is that it uses S3, which is something I've been looking at for my own startup. $0.15/gb/month for storage.
Google Apps Premier vs Standard Feature List
Passionate Users Jumpstart Creativity
Let The Best Idea Win
Be Chaotic Neutral
Craigslist is Worth More than eBay
The inverse relationship between efficiency of your tool and your understanding of what it does
Google Battles Microsoft Head On
So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate. Unless you have solid reasons to believe that the two sets of qualities are strongly correlated, I am not so sure you should be even consider using this as a metric. Having worked in Silicon Valley for some time now, I can say that some of the smartest people around here have inadequate language (and by implication -- commenting) skills. Quality of people's resumes are likely to provide a stronger indicator.
How to Advertise Effectively on Facebook
Guess this mystery paranoid entrepreneur
Amazon's S3, pay by the byte storage.
Municipal Wireless on Democratic Agenda
Alan Turing: Codebreaker and AI Pioneer
MIT undergrad's reactions to working at a startup
Yes! That's something I don't like about reddit - I spend my time giving them free content, and I don't even get a link back to my own web site:-/
Excellent point; YC might find that combining individuals and 2,3 member teams into new companies is where they get the most out of their portfolio.

I'll probably apply for the next round as a 1-person entity myself, though unless YC announces they're changing that policy, I doubt they'll pick me.
The trust factor is the difference: you can't fake cool, and you can't fake integrity.

Whereas eBay (these days, anyway) lets scammers "blow-up" auctions in its pursuit of listing fees (http://www.nickchandler.com/blog/ebay/nigerians-provide-free-shill-bidding-on-ebay.html), Craigslist cares about people abusing its listings -- check out Craig Newmark himself replying to a blogger's complaint about the apartment listings (http://www.mandellonline.com/?p=81#comments).
Badger: Badge Any RSS Feed
Lecture videos from my favorite undergrad CS class
Interesting Craig's List design breakdown
Please, may we have a mashable feed of some sort? RSS probably wouldn't work, but a JSON object would....
How a linker works [video, admittedly in RM format]
Free conference calls you can setup over the web
We've had to be on a bunch of conference calls even as a startup. Especially as a startup it's hard to even have the partners always in the same place to talk to lawyers, clients, etc. when you don't have an office. So this thing has perfect quality and is totally free. I can't believe if even exists.

Skype conferences suck in comparison.
CNN: Next net 25 startups to watch
Can you let me know precisely how to reproduce it? Has anyone else experienced anything like this?
UI design: When tags work (librarything.com) and when they don't (amazon.com)
I hope we can tell the difference between people who are smart and those who are merely articulate.

(We all have a lot of experience dealing with hackers, after all.)
What a strange mix. About half seem obvious, and the other half totally random.
On Cloning YC in Europe
Startup Stories - Read about the experiences of startups including reddit
Mobile Advertising Marketplace AdMob Serves One Billion Ads in Six Months
Where to Find a Cofounder - by Chris Campbell of Wufoo