skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) There are hundreds of different cellphone models. You need to alter your product to work on each one. Even the cellphone companies aren't able to do this. Nokia tried to make a software program that would let you find your friends, and they could only make it work on seven or eight of their OWN phones. Yahoo has search software that works on many models of phones, but they also have 100 hackers employed to work full time on just that. You won't have 100 people.

2) The cell phone carriers turn off parts of the bluetooth spectrum to prevent people from downloading their own ringtones. This also prevents people from using your software if it needs bluetooth.

3) Cell phone carriers will never partner with you. At least not on terms that allow you to make a profit.

4) Even if one cell phone carrier partners with you, the rest won't.

5) Any software that takes advantage of the phone feature will drain the battery very fast. If you need to ping the cell tower ever five minutes, that means you have to recharge the phone every two hours. Which essentially means the phone is now worthless for making calls.

6) Most people don't know how to load software onto their cellphone, even if they were willing to pay for it.

7) Even if you can get some people using your software on their phone, to everyone else it will just look like they are sending text messages. If no one can see others using your software then it isn't viral and it won't spread.

8) Cell phones don't fit into the pockets of girls pants. (This is actually a serious problems)

9) There have been hundreds of entrepreneurs who have gone into mobile, and they have all failed. I can name two dozen companies that have tried to do social networking over cell phones. It's clearly something people want, but none have been able to release a decent product for the reasons above.

10) The next generation of WiFi will make probably make your product obsolete in two years anyway.
It's a good point about spending. I live in Atlanta but have had clients in Los Angeles. I almost opened an office for a former employer in LA, and my analysis showed that housing was my only big additional cost. If I had arranged for rental housing through my employer it would have been cool.
Interview w/ CEO Justin Kan of Justin.TV at Tycoons Row
Yes, but it is somewhat remarkable that the bands actually make more money without DRM. The copyright holders/labels want us to believe that bands will make less without it.
Web 2.0 gives birth to Politics 2.0
Interview with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress
"chat powered by Lingr"

http://www.lingr.com/
Designing on the grid
Entrepreneurs: Why Younger is Better
Last.fm Event Pictures Greasemonkey Script
first post for politics.

this is a "startup" news site. plz keep the "Startup News", `politics free` :)
Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
Great post. Thanks paul!
The company that creates companies brings you the startup about being a startup. Wow.
I would argue that every max you hit is a local maxima, you just have to be creative / innovate to find a bigger local max (untill possibly you hit some kind of insurmountable barrier)
New Social Bookmark/News Launched
Yeah, that would be good I think. I usually modify the title anyway after submission, since most page's <title>'s aren't very good.
Looks like a public version of campfire.
http://www.campfirenow.com/
Any ideas on taking justin.tv further by allowing viewers to more actively participate in Justin's life?
For example, when Justin meets someone for the first time, viewers might get the opportunity to show flashbacks from Justin's life to give a first impression.
Another idea applicable if this sort of thing becomes more popular would be to allow viewers to click on people in the live video feed who are broadcasting their lives to switch to those people's live feed.
Whoah, as the viewer numbers climbed rapidly the quality of conversation in the chat quickly dropped off.

I've seen this link posted far too many times in there: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
Another idea would be to have a prediction market about all sorts of short-term events (e.g., in the next day/week) in Justin's life.
What was changed in the later editions?
thx, I'll get back to this as soon as I can.
"How often will Justin go to the bathroom today?"

"How many hours will Emmett go without sleep?"

I can see it working, up untill the point the digg users arrive: "When will Justin totally bang a chick?!?"
This is perhaps my second favorite, after Clean Firetrucks:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/12/clean_firetruck.html
How secret do startup proposals to Y Combinator need to be?  Should applicants avoid making any of their prototypes public?
To complicate matters, what if your proposal is rejected in this coming round but you are thinking of applying again in the following round?

Clearly, not making a prototype public becomes more of an issue in that case.
"Be Narrow," he said, "Be Tiny." Today, he flat-out admitted "I was working on Odeo at the time I wrote that, and I was ignoring most of those rules."

The difference between knowing something intellectually and actually living it. It's so easy to convince yourself you're following your own rules, even when you're not.
It's your company. Why would it be an issue whether or not it was secret?
Great response. We are in Beta and trying to get everything looking good for our public launch. We hope to have the FAQ's updated soon and be more descriptive on our front page. Thanks for the feed-back.
Because they may not fund it if it is not.
Another thing that happens too with this cramming of industries is that all of the legitimate good ideas are blended in with the others. It becomes harder for a business with a great idea to not be compared to every other obvious idea in their market.
Well this is exactly the kind of thing that isn't very obvious. It sounds like once you're wealthy there's a new set of rules you have to live by. It's a shame everyone has had to re-learn these things for themselves because a few bad apples can control their jealousy.

Very good to hear it's somewhere in your essay queue though. I'll try not to get rich before you write it, so I have some idea of what to expect :-)
A nice article detailing a truth that may apply to all things team-oriented. Think March Madness. You can have all the talent in the world, but you have to have a good team to be a champion. Go Heels!
But haven't they funded people with existing products?
GigaOM: The Coming Apollo vs. Firefox Battle
Curious if this will play out like she describes. If you are targeting web developers it would seem like a bad idea to battle Firefox.
This post says the wrong number of comments. Weird.
Even if that were to be the case, it might still discourage them from funding your proposal.
I think except in very rare cases Derek from CD Baby says it best...

Awful idea = -1
Weak idea = 1
So-so idea = 5
Good idea = 10
Great idea = 15
Brilliant idea = 20

No execution = $1
Weak execution = $1000
So-so execution = $10,000
Good execution = $100,000
Great execution = $1,000,000
Brilliant execution = $10,000,000
You don't have to keep anything secret for our sake. This batch we funded three companies that were already launched, Buxfer, Weebly, and Virtualmin.
boso was also launched and had an active community at the time of funding, though it subsequently evolved into auctomatic which we've only just launched.
Oops, true, make it four.
The VC model encourages/forces founders to go for huge exits. You can't do a series A round and then sell the company for 10 million. Probably not even 20. The VCs won't let you. So they're more likely to get the giant outcomes that make up for the losses on the rest of their portfolio. Whereas there's nothing to prevent the founders of a startup we fund selling early for comparatively little.

Also, VCs have leverage working for them. They get a percentage of the returns on other people's money. We're using only our own.

Smaller principal x lower returns = less profit. Probably. But we're hoping to make enough that we can at least keep doing this.
As much as I'm a fan of Open Source and support Firefox I don't think there's realistically any battle to be fought here.

Flash has nearly 100% install base across every single browser and can get users to upgrade extremely quickly with their nearly-automatic upgrade system.

Not to mention the horde of experienced Flash developers chomping at the bit to make offline versions of their apps.
Following my access logs and obviously late to the discussion. Good early feedback, much appreciated.

I'm building CrowdVine because I want to see social networks treated as first class social media applications, joining blogs, wikis, and pod/video-casts.

In response to the nothing to do but read blogs comment, in a niche social network the people are the content. Connecting to them and finding ways to build an identity within the community are the main activities. If you're applying social networks in way that ties in with people's identity then you can have a lot of socializing without a lot of features. If you're (mis)applying a social network to a topic that has nothing to do with people's identity then you're going to have to build in a lot of other activities.

I think it's a big boon that Ning decided to focus just for the fact that it helps define the market. They obviously have an amazing team. It'll be interesting to see if they stay with the social-networks-for-everyone market given that they're already doing deals for bigger networks (for CBS), neither of their founders actually uses the software to run a social network, and that they're already 27 people big and 9 million in the hole.
Markus Frind posted this on his blog a short while ago: http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/03/15/custom-channels/

It sounds like you can at least split things up by age.
Firefox isn't going anywhere. Even if Apollo catches on like nothing since C, it wouldn't kill Firefox; the user still needs a browser.

Yes, FF supports rich application development in XUL, and yes, Apollo might compete with that somewhat, but it doesn't really matter. XUL is there not as a feature but as a tool: the FF UI is built with XUL. That it is useful for others is really just a detail. In FF3, there will be more emphasis and support given to XUL apps, but still, it's there for the browser.

Also, the degree of competitions between FF and Apollo is, I think, overestimated. Apollo is basically just another RAD toolkit. XUL apps aren't desktop apps, they run directly in the browser just like Ajax apps. That gives them an entirely different use case than Apollo. (E.g. if FF becomes widespread, XUL might compete with Ajax when building something like gmail. Apollo wouldn't--a desktop app built with web tech is still a desktop app.)
Listening to your inner critic will convince you every idea you have, every opportunity to consider, everything you do and say, are worthless.

If only there was a way to kill that skeptical prick. I think my inner critic could have convinced Steve Jobs that PCs would never take off.
I'm not saying Apollo will replace Firefox -- just that Apollo will win the war for developer attention in developing "rich internet applications".
This is a PayPerPost astroturfing spam blog post. Do not upvote. msgbeepa is spamming these regularly.
Not sure this would be much of a problem with consumers. How many people know about open source reverse engineered implementations of file sharing protocols?

It might even be a plus. Samba is a successful project, perhaps they can milk some of that goodwill from the subconsciouses of those who do know.
Great writing paul!
Ask the Wizard: Launch Late to Launch Often
that would be what is called self-fulfiling profecy...and it wouldn't work
I can almost taste the mediocrity.
So an awful idea with a brilliant execution will cost you $10,000,000? That's quite a bit of bail money, yes?
I am not sure if emails are good or bad though. I personally hate spamming by different websites. But while facebook could send so many emails to you a day (wall posts, photos, etc.) they're incredibly successful.
Great points. Our model wasn't set up to support del.icio.us and we are working on the export of citations.
Check if your emails are read
I the Guy Kawasaki says it the best: You won't fail only if you won't try.
I've had this discussion several times with one of the early developers of del.icio.us. It is by far one of my favorite web tools, and I think one of the most useful things about it is the way that it encourages a sort of conversation between its users (ie, someone can send a bookmrak to me, which of itself, begins a sort of dialogue between us, or can write a description in the notes taht I know is intended for me). What I find disappointing sometimes is that when this happens there is no way for me respond to them directly about the link (you can send messages to another user, but then you lose a lot of the context). The most obvious answer would be to allow me to comment on other users' bookmarks or "send" them a message back about the bookmark they sent me. The explanation I keep getting when I say this is that they didn't want to distract users or muddy the purpose of the app by turning it into another blogging tool. Ultimately, I think they made the right choice not to add this feature. It keeps it clean and useful while still allowing for self expression within the core of the application. I would probably like Digg a lot more if I weren't so damned distracted by all of the threaded comments that follow each post, most of which are completely useless.
Dinging the Web 2.0 Bell
"Is the hassle of adding your friends to the site going to be far smaller than the benefit?"

Good point. If it's more useful to you to have more of your friends on the site then you will try to recruit them. But if it's still not vauable at all to them, then they will just think you are sending them junkmail. I think the most thriving online communities are the ones that grow organically. History shows us, it doesn't matter what the tool is, if people can use it to communicate with one another, they will find a way.
It'll probably just cost some dumb VC 10 mil, not you personally.
No one ever knows exactly what the curve after the current point is like, especially in a changing environment like in the web business. By taking risk one is able to check out if there's a higher local Max.
In principle I agree with what he is saying: If you know what you are going to need you should put in effort up front so you can react faster later. The problem is with knowing what you are going to need. You hear that startups end up moving away from there initial ideas so often that bar for being sure that you "know" what you're going to need is very high.

I also think he overstates the difficulties of abstracting out extensible pieces as you go. His point about your # of customers being proportional to the difficulty of refactoring is well taken, but for an early startup this probably does not mean as much as he suggests. On the web you can do a great deal that is transparent to your customers. The risk of this approach might lie more in not having to discipline to take the time to refactor as you go as opposed to not having the technical ability. 37 Signals seems to have had certain project go very well for them by pushing down abstractions as they went (granting however, that everyone can't count on a gang of open source hackers coming in and both contributing to and evangelizing your product's infrastructure - though maybe this isn't a bad goal?).
I always liked this post on the value of ideas:
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/08/ideas_are_just_a_multiplier_of.html
Benchmark Capital takes on 8th partner: Mitch Lasky (Jamdat CEO)
"The firm prides itself the equal status of its partners, in contrast to many other firms, where there can be hierarchies ranging from managing partner on top to the suitcase-carrying principal at bottom. The Benchmark partners took a "pay-cut" to bring Lasky on board -- dividing profits ("carry") and fees by eight, instead of seven."

Not knowing much about the way VCs are structured internally I found that pretty interesting. It does seem like a big vote of confidence that they would split profits like that -- just like a startup might.
8 tips for a good elevator pitch
Remember, DRM is merely an attempt to control how you acquire and experience music. It's a facelift to an aging concept called physical distribution in a web-empowered society.
Vyroo - Virtual Office Application
I have wondered about the usefulness of "secure" pseudonymous online publication / discussion. It would probably be very difficult if you want to discuss drafts with real-life acquaintances. But it should be able to handle the problem you speak of? It is a pity to have information exchange suffer from that kind of problem.
"[...] where in the world you want to live and which car matches your personality best?"

I'm not sure if you're kidding or not. The only real benefit I can see on top of a merely above-average-income western lifestyle is that you don't need a job. Which of course can make a huge difference, as I learnt from my last employer.

But I imagine that selling a company for $xx m wouldn't change things for the positive apart from that. Maybe most people who got rich from startups get disillusioned and are embarrassed to speak of it? (I don't think this is the case with the YC founders though...)
Just got a heads up that last.fm are about to release a new beta any minute now that makes this script redundant :)
Wink pulls an Odeo - buys back stock from investors
Top 10 Best Flash Website Designs of 2007
How come the article does not load?
launched today: reddit-twitter hybrid coded in lisp in 3 days
And yet YCombinator is funding Loopt. Care to explain this? Does this mean you think Loopt will fail as well?
Windows Vista.
Is popular YouTube ad big trouble for Hillary?  (What can we learn from independent ads for Obama?)
One might imagine a web service that rewards people for creating such unsolicited ads in a financial way based on the effectiveness of those ads.

In essence, instead of having a company tightly control its image, it would leave marketing to people interested in trying out their own ads independently. And those who succeed in helping the company financially are paid in return.
Rough Type: Deneutralizing the net
Yawn! Hasn't this been done already? Hello Jennicam, livecam, youtube?! I mean sure its neat, and its a polished website, but long term sustainability? Is it sticky enough to have me glued in day in and day out? I give it 3 months before it taps out. I mean its no trueman show here folks and ya don't even empower folks along the way. Why not tell people how ya did it? Share some real insight. How exactally am I living through their lives.. by watching them sleep? I did that sleep study last month, it wasnt that fun really. This is basically a short term startup biz idea, take 4 guys that do stuff, slap cameras on them, watch them make more stuff. Now I'd give them a bit more huff if they at least connected themselves to ambient like devices, nabaztag, or ambient orb, or something else other than forcing me to go to a widget to see if they ate a bagel or not today.. i dunno.
Eeek I can see your points. Although there must be a way to work around this. Any thoughts?
"The only real benefit I can see on top of a merely above-average-income western lifestyle is that you don't need a job."

How about the security of knowing that you're able to provide a safety net for your loved ones in an emergency? Or the ability to self-fund your own projects without having to settle?

I'm not saying being rich makes you happy or that it doesn't have its own set of problems -- just that it can provide the freedom of choice and financial security to allow you to worry about the truly big challenges in life.

Spending 75%+ of your waking hours working just to put food on the table is pretty boring, even cavemen had this much.
I'm actually quite curious about how he's accomplishing this... my best guess is that he's using the demographic info to redirect each age group to a different URL, e.g. 18-25 goes to pof.com/a/, 26-45 goes to pof.com/b/, and 45+ goes to pof.com/c/.

I was hoping though, that if my users are talking about cars, they get car ads. (or, even better, mesothelioma!)
See A YCombinator Meal Live Today at 7pm PST (2am GMT)
I'm building a whole startup around something a little bit like this...
Very interesting, turns the market upside down.

You could run it like a startup model combined with the recent doritos campaign (big cash prize for the winners). Throw around small (seed) money to anyone with a half decent idea...give out "A-round" funding to campaigns that focus-group well to expand their ideas...and entice everybody onwards with a big cash prize (acquisition!) for the campaigns that succeed.

You would need a very solid plan for determining "effectiveness" of the campaigns. Something that the advertisers trusted enough that they are willing to guarantee payment when you determine their campaign has been "successful".

Pretty simple site with a client side where advertisers can submit the broad outlines of what they're looking for, user side for submissions. Sit in the middle and skim off a little cash as the money flows past...

Very scalable. Advertisers are desperate for creative new approaches. Billions for the taking.
The search for slogans
Dunno if I'm willing to invest my time to watch these guys. Is the ordinary joe willing to watch this as well??
Or maybe find out that what they're watching is totally a waste of their time.
Ok so what is it? I see a search box and I typed in 'Python' and it asked me to start a conversation. Note that I've missed the Twitter craze.
Thanks for the heads-up post. This is great. I've long hoped there'd be some way for those of us that can't attend YC stuff to get a peak.

In case any Justin'ers read this: On the Lingr chat I can't send messages in either Opera9 or Firefox2 under Linux. Tried other Lingr chats and they work fine, so probably something Justin specific.

Error: times has no properties
Source File: http://justin.tv/screens/js/prototype-chat-poll-justintv-swfobject-rico-effects-lingr-json
Line: 2552

(I'll email this bug report as well)
37signals Finally Launches Highrise
Allow the universe to change me? Sounds like some weird Scientology schlep to me.
37signals Launches Highrise - lightweight CRM
GoPlan takes on 37Signals... is that a horrible idea?
ooo, I'm curious to hear more
I've been looking forward to highrise for a while now.

Shame they've limited it to only 25 contacts in the free version, makes it very hard to evaluate :(
I've read alot about 37Signals and quite a few people have said that it's a really bad idea to compete with them. I'm personally not afraid, but I wondered if anyone had any input on that subject. The things I've heard are that you never want to compete against a company that is smart, fast, and small and 37Signals would be that company. Anyone have any thoughts?
Startup Lessons from the Lockheed Skunk Works
they did away with a-typical quicktime videos to explain the thing this time around, now its follow the GREEN arrow... i dunno if i like that, though it does appear simpler in my head vs a movie telling me how to use the app

looks like a good product, i could see using it for work, but like anything, i tend to be alone in that catagory at times, i'm still trying to get co-workers to see the light on social networks and heck photo-sharing..
Good post! I think having a grand design ahead of time is good, if its a good design. To me, this is about the scientific approach vs the engineering approach. You can get in trouble with either one. Option one: you have your grand design but nobody needs it. Option two: you keep iterating something but at some point improvement stops (try to cure cancer this way).
It shouldn't be a problem as long as you're putting out a product that is better or offers something new. In the end it's the product/service that determines the winner, not how small, fast or smart a team is.