skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Despite the fact that we're coders, we're not necessarily smart.

But at the same time, I think that what makes us capable of pursuing startups is our potential to learn quickly. That's one of the best traits to search for in a partner. Running a startup is difficult. Having somebody who can adapt quickly is more important than someone who's smart and static.
Your guesses are pretty accurate. And ordered from most - least preferable. :) We'd really hate to place ads particularly if they reduce usability and cleanliness of the site.
PowerPoint is Evil - Lessons from Edward Tufte
By having our works exposed to the market, we get direct feedbacks that erase some of our delusions we have about ourselves, so we can have peace of mind and don't live the rest of our lives unconsciously envy those who we perceive to be less capable than us.
To Do List, Making GTD a bit easier
I read "Good to Great", it's an awesome book for mature companies, but not really relevant for startups. Though never mentioned, I can sort of see Google fitting the profile of an up-and-coming "great company" according to the author's definition (one that will beat the market over the long term).
"Ultimately the goal is to understand *all* your expenses completely at a central location."

That's an excellent goal to have. Full integration of bank and credit card accounts would definitely be important for me.

The following may be outside of the scope of your product, but I would love to have a system that knew my finances and goals so well that it could give me useful advice such as "start buying product A, which you seem to use a lot of, in bulk from store B", "use the savings you have in account X to reduce the debt you have on credit card Y", "apply for this savings account that has a higher interest rate than the one you have now", etc. Such a system would have to understand things like credit cards that are zero-percent for a given period of time and so on. It would probably also need to know my credit rating so that it could guess what credit card offers I could realistically apply for.

To make this a little more concrete, my fiancee and I have spent a lot of time recently trying to figure out how we should best combine our various debts and assets. It's been very boring to be honest - lots of comparing interest rates that seems like it could be automated.

Good luck anyway!
He should've worn black.
Congrats guys. I had the same idea last summer, started to implement it and then never bothered to finish it. What you guys have looks good. Safari support would be nice though.
Can't we just take Paul Graham's writings as a given here? Is there anyone who is not aware of them? Perhaps this site itself should link here:

http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

Edit: never mind, it's already linked at the bottom of the page.
I've spent the last two decades making other people rich. I've worked on cool stuff but been ordered to do dumb things. Yeah, I got patents and promotions but the time I spent preparing for them, or implementing DRM or copy protection could have been better spent making better products. I want to make myself rich this time (or at least a little better off) by focusing on something that someone really needs - not a fickle consumer, but a business customer who will pay to be able to do something faster or cheaper or with more precision, or to do something that wasn't previously possible. A month ago I walked and I'm not looking back.
"The funniest thing is that investment banks hire based on GPA even though there is zero correlation between GPA and alpha, and alpha is 100% of your job performance. "

No wonder so many high profile mutual funds can't even beat the index.
Hi,
What web framework are you guys using? Rails? Django? something else?

(Awesome product btw)
Just object-oriented PHP. No framework, yet.
Stuff To Do - prioritize and share tasks, time tracking (beta)
Still quite beta, doesn't work with IE, but I think I have hit on a few good ideas with it. It's certainly an area with a lot of competitors though, so I'm not sure how far I'll take it. Thoughts?
ShopList - mobile phone shopping list that's actually usable
My company recently went through layoffs and it seems that the only people who got canned were the ones who have been there for 15+ years. These layoffs didnt seem to be performance based. They seemed to be "size of pay check" based ( people who have been there longer obviously make more money that the newer people). I don't want to be the "guy who got laid off" in 10 years time ( I've been there for 6 yrs). I want to make enough money to be able to decide whether or not I have to work, and not be forced to be "code monkey" for a large company, that won't even bat an eyelid when its time for them to show me the door.
I was quite happy with this application and am thinking a lot about what other interesting things could be done with a fusion of mobile phones and the web...

Most of the j2me shopping lists are crap because who in their right mind would want to sit around typing in a shopping list via a phone's keypad?
I want to make stuff that doesn't suck with people that don't suck, and I want a piece of the risk and rewards.
I just wanted to compliment your use of third party APIs for authentication. This definitely helps that initial adoption barrier.

How do you guys feel about OpenID?
Forbes Special Report on Achievement
I've only had the chance to read two of the articles but they were nice reads. I recommend the article "We're all Failures."
Simple and nifty. I'm already accustomed to typing out a shopping list (or whatever else I need to remember) on the PC and texting that to my mobile.

But you're right; the most interesting aspect of this is the fetch from the service's server. I've been exploring ways to tinker with such an integration but I haven't gotten anything just yet. This makes me want to look into it again.
Resources to get from Idea to In Business
"The most common regrets all shared one trait: inaction."

Nice
Cool simple little tool, but it has only a very tentative relationship to GTD (which, for example, organizes by context, and not by priority).
top -- reddit.com

yah I'm a dork
"This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time." While we are at it, we might as well create something beautiful. YouTube, Google, and MySpace managed to change the very lifestyles of its users; if you could build something that amazing, why wouldn't you? :)

Whatever we do here will eventually be lost in time. And those who do remember our dream, they too will inevitably perish. To me, creating something of great value to others is the only reason why we even matter. Besides that, our worth is simply that of the atoms that make us.

Put simply. a startup is my opportunity to change the world.
I think that while it's obvious there are some advantages to working with someone that does other things (sales/marketing/finance), one of the reasons why I find myself agreeing that it's best to work with another techie is that it makes the relationship easier. It's easy to wonder if someone else is working as hard as you if you're the one coding the entire system and they're just supposed to sell it or market it. I suppose the opposite is true too... how does the non techie know that you're capable of doing what you dream up? In a relationship that needs to be very trusting, perhaps it's just easier if everyone speaks the same language and works on similar things. It's also easier to divvy up the money and control if it's obvious to everyone what their role is.
Reuters to Create Online Financial Community Site
dupe. I thought these were automatically getting caught?

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1884
notes from the Tufte conference if you are interested (http://files.jamiequint.com/tuftenotes.txt) Its only the second half unfortunately - they don't give you a place to plug in your laptop?! - and I always lose loose paper notes.
Google Trends (Very useful, for those who don't already use it)
The Future of Small Business
50 Beautiful CSS-Based Web-Designs in 2006
I want fdisk for the internet.
why is this dead... ?
I haven't read "The Halo Effect" yet, but in my opinion, the book "Good to Great" was excellent. Unfortunately, that book was not of much help for my own startup since it was written for well established corporations (such as GE, Microsoft, etc) and not small time startups. But great book nonetheless :)

- Jawad Shuaib
Probably the problem is just the color scheme; it's fruit salad.
Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds
It won't be useful for new startups since there isn't enough "volume" to create a trend.

It is, however, an interesting tool for observing on going patterns. Here is a trend I tried with "Web 2.0" and "Digg":
http://google.com/trends?q=Web+2.0%2C+Digg&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
A very interesting bit from the article:

"Microsoft: When Todd Proebsting, director of Microsoft's Center for Software Excellence, tested a prediction market internally, managers quickly gave it their blessing.

The goal: to have 25 members of a development team predict when a Microsoft product would ship (this was an internal product, not one sold externally). The prediction market was set up in August 2004, and the product that "had been in the works for a long time" was scheduled to ship in November 2004.

Each "trader" received $50 in their account to start with, and was told that the more accurate their prediction, the more money they would make. The market opened with an initial price of on-time delivery set to 16 2/3 cents.

"The price of 'before November' dropped to zero right away," Proebsting said. "The price of 'on time' in about two to three minutes dropped to 2.3 cents on the dollar." Translated, that's more than 30-to-1 odds against on-time delivery.

Then the woman who was responsible for scheduling started trying to convince her colleagues who were buying and selling future delivery dates. "She was able to talk (on-time delivery) up to around 3 cents," Proebsting said. "People really enjoyed moving the price...They loved this."

"The next day the director comes into my office and said, 'What have you done?'" Proebsting said. But further investigation showed that the product actually was behind schedule, even though nobody was telling management, and it eventually shipped in February."

It is amazing what the crowds are capable of! Often times, groups can be smarter than the smartest individuals in them.
I agree, but you could work something out without the government maybe. Individuals and organisations are worried about disaster too...
For Start-Ups, Web Success on the Cheap
All software should be social
Ithaca

As you set out for Ithaca

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon - don't be afraid of them:

you' ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon - you won't encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind -

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you're destined for.

But don't hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you're old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you've gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca won't have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

K.Kavafis
come on everyone, stop denying it!

you just want to conquer the world ;)
The End Of Management?
Manager's manage people, information, and actions. Prediction markets aggregate predictions. Not much overlap.
Assuming YC money are not enough to get someone a green card, I suppose meaning you can't get him incorporated, would you accept someone who could spend his own money the first 2-3 months while being part of YC 2007, so that in the case of helping him getting more funding enough to get the green card, you get also your percentage?
PBWiki rasies $2M- plus a sidenote on VCs
The screencast you posted was very nice, and very similar to the Turbogears screencast in spirit. In fact both frameworks look very very similar from the screencasts, with the only differences being URL mapping, the syntax of the methods in the controller, and the templating language. All of those I can adapt to.

What I am really curious about is a few features of Rails that were just stunning and made our life so much easier when making our prototype. They were:

1.) Easy database migrations.

2.) The :AsTree and related specifiers in ActiveRecord that automatically creates utility methods for the object model (such as searching over parents/children of a record)

3.) Easy handling of session data

I haven't found any mention of these features in either Django or TurboGears and I haven't snooped enough yet to find them. If you know if they are there, and how they are done, please let me know!
Bugs of news.ycombinator.com
If you submit a comment, you are returned to the page you were commenting. But if you refresh that page (x), the comment is re-submitted. I suppose, a no-cache and an expire header of the submit request page would avoid this problem of replicating by mistake the submittions...
Clowns, Dinosaurs, and Lunatics - On Beating Your Competition
mmm, great article submitted about manipulating women using psychological, emotional and cognitive means. Dude reads article - leaves computer, meets a girl. Dude gets laid.

alternatively: article submitted on how to scale dating sites. Dude has idea and builds new-fangled dating site. Many people get laid by dating site. Dude gets famous for getting other people laid. Many girls thank dude. Dude gets laid.
iReader Content Distilling and Vector-Based-Search (Cringley)
I'd like to propose a theorem.

X = the number of possible actions a user can take on your site.
Y = the number of actions that can potentially get them laid.

X / Y = the probability of success of your social software. Let's call it the jwz ratio.
Monthly startup meeting in Palo Alto
Some problems with mashups
The prequel "Built to Last", however, is great for startups. He studied "visionary companies" in that one (including HP, IBM, Merck, 3M, etc.), and includes a lot about *how* a visionary company starts. I heard echoes of Built to Last in Woz's presentation at the startup school, so it's not just old-economy companies that it applies to.
Sending xhtml as text/html considered harmful
Microsoft totally sucking at online advertising: "outlook grim"
Analysis of three ways to build an online media business to $50m in revenues
I downloaded the Firefox extension and it doesn't work. It just displays an empty bubble when I mouseover a link.
If one Steve is rare, two Steves are rarer. Maybe someone could do the math, but it's pretty obvious.
"pine became Gmail"

Yeah. Google invented online email. Seriously, does google pay for fanboyism by the pound or what? Geez.
Nice article Jeremy. My answer though is none of the above.

First, most social networks make just as much money off selling data as they do from ads.

Second, all the ads you mention fall into the same category. That is, the product being advertised potentially creates value for the user. So basically the user has to click on the link and buy the product.

The most profitable advertising is the type where the ad itself creates value for the user, in addition to the product being advertised. For example, music videos on MTV.

Unfortunately all of the social networks in existence today are monetized under the traditional model.

The startup I'm currently working on (kitchen table phase) is a social networking thing that actually allows users to manipulate advertising spatially in three dimensions. Of course the user's perspective is completely different, all they see is how the website makes their life easier (and gets them laid) and not how its being monetized.
Because I want to get it right this time. In my previous startup I never felt more alive, creatively engaged and felt like I was doing the best work of my career. Life is short and no job holds the attraction to me that a startup does.
You should try WorkHack.com, it is a todo list compatible with IE and firefox.
The Entrepreneur Bubble
Having not lived the days of yore, I'm guessing that there were inferior mail clients that came before pine that are now long-forgotten because pine was better. Gmail is a similarly superior online email; it may not be the first, but it's the best, and that's all anyone remembers.
False Dilemma. The author frames it as if its a choice between starting a startup that has a high probability of failing or doing nothing. However, most people who don't start startups have to work work for big companies, which have all the same problems but worse.
[IBM developerWorks] Develop Web applications for local use - Learn when a browser is better than a GUI application, and when a CGI is best of all
For laughs: Drug Dealers vs. Geeks
The Most Destructive Metric in Software Development
Don't worry, I'm busy working on Stuff To Do right now to make it work with IE.

Also, some extras that Stuff To Do has:

* Groups - share tasks with other people in your work group with simple drag/drop.

* Time tracking. Keep track of how much time you've spent on each thing.

* Reports. No fancy graphs, yet, but it does break things down by day and task over preselected time periods.
There are opportunity costs involved with starting a company instead of working at BigCo, and if there is, as the article says, an "entrepreneur bubble", then some people are doubtless making the wrong choice.
Well, that's a challenge for us, then. Let's see if we can make the y-coord of the overhead line start below the time-saved line :P

Also, we'd love to know what is causing your inertia at this moment.
The Next Generation Of "Google Adsense"?
Integrating directly with banks is on the cards

Did you mean 'in the cards' or are you an Agile/XP shop?
Tim O'Reilly's talk suddenly turns into the last 10 minutes of your talk at 17:00.
Very thought provoking
big companies, which have all the same problems

Big companies have revenue. Most Web 2.0 companies don't and are going for the liquidity event.
I never realized it but the characteristics are strikingly similar. Hilarious!
Google - what's the big Idea?
Business model for Web 2.0
wouldn't top be alexa.com (etc.), or internet storm center? ;)
we each have one life to live, this makes the most of my life and takes the most out of it.
Well, elm came before pine, and the mailreader I use now, mutt, is elm-descended.
news.yc is a little more straightforward: geek reads submitted articles. Geek learns about building startups. Geek applies to YC. Geek gets rich. Geek gets laid.
Big companies are missing the "under the radar" component, so you get less duplication.
Why I Love School...
the writer of the articles compares two unequal things. The 80s with this era... The situation is a lot different. People back then didn't have any other channel to reach potential users, than marketting, which they had to pay.

The web is a new place, and the market is broader and global. You can be next to your grandma in Greece and sell to a client as far as Brazil through word of mouth......

my friends don't let some static minds trick you.

shall the best (lim best -> oo) win ;) ...
On blog templates: designing is thinking; every detail deserves to be thought about
OK, I sent you guys my thoughts using the feedback link.
Yes, ecuzzillo said exactly what I meant. I also remember reading that Gmail consciously adopted Pine keyboard shortcuts (though I may have that wrong), which is why I made the direct link. Gmail seems like a very UNIX-y web mail client, where Hotmail, say, was not.

-Marc Hedlund
WOO HOO!! I'll join you. :)
In all seriousness, its about building something that I can say "Yeah, that was me." not hide my face anytime someone mentions the product. It is nice to have the freedom to build effective, beautiful products, and the money is a nice kicker too, but it really comes down to not regretting my life. 20, 30, or 40 years spent building things for other people, things that aren't the best, or things that aren't pride inspiring, its not for me thank you.
Everything is cool - except the "CSS" part. What if some of those designs looked the same but used say...tables? I'm guessing they wouldn't make it on that list.

It is a dangerous path to become a standard fanatic for an entrepreneur and sites such as this encourage it. When my site goes live, the site layout showing up right in common browsers is more critical than having a "Trophy Homepage" powered by "Nothing But CSS."

That said, some inspirational designs!
Cool, good luck, also consider reading http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_It_Just_Doesnt_Matter.php

I recommend reading the whole book Getting Real (free from 37signals) especially chapter 5 on feature selection.
Vertical market entry strategy is the key
Microsoft Insider: "15% of Windows Vista written in INTERCAL"
USA Today goes social: lots of complaints in the comments, but it's actually pretty well done
This could just be my English crapping out at the wrong time. All I meant was "coming soon"!
it's kind of complicated, whatever process you choose. email me at gustaf@gmail.com if you want help. I'm from sweden and our company got funded by Y Combinator in November.
USATODAY.com goes social (sorry for the double post!)
I can see this appealing to maybe a couple hundred people in the entire world. Which is all it needs to be insanely profitable. Seriously, I bet some of the Fark photoshop contestants and Worth1000 people will be really into this.
Where this guy goes wrong is that he assumes (without realizing it) that there's some limit on the number of startups there can be. But that's probably not true.

No one proposes there's any limit on the number of people who can be employed by companies with thousands of people. Why should there be any limit on how many fragments that effort can be broken into?
USA Today completely misses the boat.

The reason the traditional first date used to be dinner and a movie was because the movie gives you something to talk about during dinner.

People read the paper for the same reason. It gives them social currency when they're talking to their friends. If you want to design a social community around your product, you have to design it so that enhances your product's core value proposition.

Instead of being about all about the reader, this new redesign is all about USA Today. The website looks like it was designed by a team of DMV employees and then sprinkled with banner ads.

Not to mention that it's five years too late.
Interview with 17 year old founder of Quizlet
Web 2.0 Online Identity Video
This is an interesting watch. I very recently did a presentation on online identities (with mentions of Web 2.0) for a course.
It's a positive thing that they're attempting to involve their community, but it's another thing when they don't understand their community in the first place.
Competitious - Keep track of your company's competitors