skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are a couple reasonable assumptions about high-karma users that we can work to our advantage:

1. They tend to spend more time reading the "new" queue than average, because they spend enough time on the site to exhaust "top" and want to read more.

2. They're more likely than average to be open-minded about controversial stories as well as less tolerant of inane ones. If they spend more time on the site, then it's more to their advantage to promote interesting stuff rather than promote an agenda. It's dumb to piss in your own pond.

Here's what I propose: high-karma users get more voting power over *young* stories, to enable them to police the "new" queue and out-muscle spammers and voting rings. After stories are a few hours old, high-karma users no longer get a boost if they haven't voted on them yet. If high-karma users have already voted on a story when it reaches the aging threshold, the boost goes away for upvotes but not for downvotes. That way:

1. Bad stories never see the light of day, because high-karma users bury them and they stay buried.

2. Controversial stories will make the front page, but they don't stay there long if the rest of the community doesn't like them.

3. Good stories make it to the front page slightly faster.
Hey JMiao, I'm in LA too. Email me at lalife.com if you want to talk shop some time!
As I recall reddit has over 50% of their traffic from outside the United States.
I understand most of these points completely. The problem I am having is finding the RIGHT cofounder. I have run with my idea for about 18 months now, and I am now just starting to get serious about it from a business stand point. Now I am frantically looking for cofounders to join me but everybody seems like they are missing a key component. A lot of people are "stoked" about the idea and thought of starting their own company and are great to bounce ideas off of, but when it comes down to it they just dont do the work. I dont want to settle just to find a cofounder quickly, but I also feel like investors wont take me as seriously unless I have a founding team.

What do you think?
That's great! I wish I got in on some of that, but for whatever reason I didn't. I agree the caliber of people was great, which is why it was frustrating not to be able to meet more of them.
This sounds a lot like a business method patent, which is generally considered a very bad idea.

A startup that faces no competition for 14 years isn't going to be a worthwhile one anyway.
Moore's law seems to die and rise from the ashes every 18 months or so.
Index of Economic Freedom 2007 - Rankings
Reminds me of peak oil
There is no absolute Right supply of either fiat money or karma. If every dollar bill in everyone's wallet magically turned into two, the price of everything would double and nobody would be materially affected. Similarly, doubling everyone's karma and causing the up arrow to give two points rather than one would have no material effect.

Inflation matters when you factor in time. Inflation encourages risk. It makes your current savings become less valuable in the future, encouraging you to try to increase your wealth to compensate. Too much inflation encourages too much risk, and you get a bubble.

Money is valuable because it can be exchanged for scarce resources. Karma is valuable because it gets you attention, which is a scarce resource. There are two kinds of attention: visibility of articles and visibility on the leader board. Karma is the cause of the latter, but only a byproduct of the former. There are a fixed number of articles on the front page and a fixed number of spots on the leader board, but both become more valuable as the community grows, because more eyeballs means more attention.

At this point, the money analogy breaks down. Money is both a unit of accounting and a medium of exchange. Karma is only a unit of accounting. It tells us how wealthy we are, but we can't exchange it for other wealth. Attention doesn't behave like a commodity either. If we give and receive the same amount of attention, that's not the same as simply doing nothing.

So, news.yc really doesn't behave anything like a conventional economy. If any analogy can be drawn at all, I'd say that we're in a state of deflation. As long as the community continues to grow, producing articles now is less profitable than producing articles later.
We have some software for dealing with spammers and voting rings. It's not that visible, but it's there.
Awesome tools for creating Web 2.0 sites and services
We're actively trying to avoid the nastiness that seems to take over so many online discussions. That's why there are fewer down-arrows here, for example. I suspect that down arrows are more often clicked on stupidly than up arrows, that if you don't have down arrows you give people fewer ways to inject stupidity into the system.

I'll probably never get around to supporting bold text in comments either, for the same reason.

To some extent news.yc is protected by being about a topic only a small number of comparatively smart people care about. With any luck we'll never have the full-blown trolls you find on general news sites. I have some ideas for solutions if trolls do start to appear.
Dang, already? Sounds like Arc is working out well.

Still, though, any statstical approach (which is what I assume you're using) is going to have some lag because you have to wait for a statistically-significant sample. You can catch any given offender after he's caused an O(1) amount of trouble, but if the offenders don't correlate with each other, you can get overwhelmed by a sufficiently large number of them. Spammers certainly do correlate with each other, but it's not obvious that voting rings do.
About 40%. I don't know what we're going to do next year if this keeps up. We'll have to recruit people to help us read the applications.
Do you use any of these tools? I used basecamp before and I would like to add oDesk to the list
List of Interesting Websites
the article's no longer available
ClickTale should be in any new startup's arsenal. Saves the need for expensive, old-school usability testing.
the point of the patent is to protect your work for discovering/implementating a method that is not state-of-art for solving a problem, not patent the problem(idea) it self.
Thats why you can have many methods (i.e many patents) solving the same problem...

Of course you can patent also business processes and designs...
Careful with the wording. WordPress isn't fully supporting OpenID, and this can be dangerous. They're acting as an identity provider without also acting as a service provider.

It's true that WordPress users can use their blogs as OpenIDs to login elsewhere, but users who already have OpenIDs can't use them at WordPress.

Unless service providers implement the entire spec and treat all OpenID users as first-class citizens, regardless of identity provider, then there's really no interoperability here. What's the point of an OpenID if you can't use it at other "OpenID-enabled" sites like WordPress?
Is anyone else from Los Angeles interested in something similar? uWink would be a pretty sweet meetup spot.
Where in LA are you guys? I'm in Pasadena.
people will pursue novel start up ideas if they feel it would be profitable to do so. you get more innovation by having many companies competing on the same ideas and trying to outdo each other.
have you heard of marketocracy? I know they have been around for a while.
^ ah, sounds like communism :p

I've joined well over 50 social networks and what I've noitced is that freedom to choose appeals more to people than the right choices already made for them. More features, more niches, more startups, more choice. Users might complain about features, but fundamentally they like choice.

The more time a user spends making choices on a network, the more loyal he or she becomes. You don't spend 12 hours of your life customizing your profile if you don't plan on sticking to it.

Lastly, too much of anything is bad. The state should have control over medical supplies, education and energy. But beyond that, it should trust the consumer with running the country.
I've started a few ventures, 2 solo, 1 w/ partner, 2 w/ partners. For me, its just a matter of knowing my strengths, knowing the goal, and then being resourceful.

Having a partner is one solution to a missing set of needs - but it also comes with a lot of baggage in many cases. Getting meaninful perspectives can come from anywhere if you have a good network and leverage it. Massive workloads can be solved with leadership skills, effecient use of capital and human resource management.

First time around sure wish I had a partner - I was crazy to be on my own. Now, I feel like a partner has to be a very strong fit to be best alternative.
I think you're doing the right thing by retaining the down arrow on comments, however. When someone writes a comment you dislike, there are four things you can do with it:

1. Ignore it

2. Downmod it

3. Write a quick reply

4. Write a thoughtful reply

Option 4 is ideal, of course, if you have the time, but you usually don't. Quick replies are what we want to avoid. That's how flamewars start. Ignoring the post is going to be unsatisfactory for the flamewar-prone. That leaves the down-arrow as a sort of relief valve. So I think its presence can actually reduce nastiness.
I actually just moved up to Palo Alto in January, but thanks for the post.
This anecdote doesn't prove much, and the writer doesn't even seem to understand the difference between angels and VCs. There are plenty of absurd valuations out there.
Web 2.0 Media: The Truth That No One Telling You About The 1 Million Digg's Users
Confirmed: Microsoft Building Google Apps/Zoho Competitor!
Matthew comments: "It seems that Microsoft is just trying to compete with other companies rather than find out what the consumer wants. They move into so many areas because they can't stand someone else being the market leader in a given sector. Apple dominates the mp3 player so Microsoft brings out the Zune and of course it doesn't sell well because it's not what people want. Apple announces the iPhone, Microsoft criticizes it then announces their phone. Now Google Apps. Man, Microsoft needs to grow up and find out what people want before Google takes them to task with Apps."
So, who's going to Startup School?
I'll be there. :)

-- Ryan Park, Stanford grad student
I'll be there as well. I'm looking forward to meeting the lot of you. :)

We have a meetup discussion going in here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2757

It'd be great to meet the startup community "after school," so let's decide on a place.
Count me in. :)
I noticed that the other day- no down arrows on replies to your comments. Very nice.
Startup school replies just came in. Let's go ahead and decide that meeting place in Palo Alto.

The school ends at 5:30, so we should all meet at 6 and discuss what we've learned.
Aha! I'd not had the realization that the the downmod arrow only appears probabilistically. It meshes interestingly with a notion that dfranke and I were discussing earlier tonight, namely the appropriate ratio of up to down mods. By controlling the prevalence of options to downmod, you can exert some control over that ration--very sly. :)
python_kiss: I don't really know that inspiration is the main yardstick by which I would judge the value of this video. I like your title better, but I can't retroactively change the title.

This video has been referenced by Marc Hedlund (Wesabe founder, previously Oreilly's entrepreneur in residence) as containing valuable suggestions for entrepreneurs:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/03/jedi_build_thei.html
I'll be there, just got my invite, I made a facebook group so we can all chat & talk about meeting up...

http://up.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2251607090

anyone else coming from out of town? (I'm coming down from Portland, OR)
I'm prone to think that pg's algorithm is, to some extent, content based. I have no real evidence to support this, just the evangelism in "A Plan for Spam."
Startup School Meetup
As I mentioned in a previous thread, I'd like to organize a Palo Alto meetup amongst Startup School/YC News participants.

If you're interested in getting together for dinner and a evening of interesting company, please e-mail:

StartupSchool2007 [at] gmail [dot] com

I'll gladly put together some form of mailing list detailing meetup details, etc.
Demo Day: Y Combinator's Spring Chicks
bgold, here's the updated link to the article - http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/16866987.htm
Web 2.0 companies face a problem: too many users in the wrong countries (Updated Dead Link)
Perfect timing- I really needed this article.

nah. just kidding.
Right. That's what I meant by "spammers correlate with each other". I'd be very surprised if content-based filtering were useful for catching voting rings. You can use graph-theoretic metrics to catch them, but unlike spammers, identifying one doesn't obviously help you identify others.
John Doerr's Startup Manual
Here's the updated link, after the original submission 5 hours ago by marcel stopped working. Thanks marcel, and enjoy the article guys!
Maybe it's better to take a loan from them with clearly defined terms. That way, if all fails, you can get a job and pay it back. No emotional damage.
I just got the email saying I was invited to the startup school, I got to admit Im really excited about it all. Im from phoenix, Arizona so I guess I can drive up to it. So, Im guessing this trip better get me some connections of some sort I cant waste time, gotta hand out my thoughts, ideas and maybe a so called business card. I cant wait!
Web 2.1 upgrade
This is a nice idea, but I feel that they will face the same problems as reddit, except that the users will be extra angry because their money is involved. Good luck to them.

Maybe it would help to have a Real Name tag like Amazon.
About half the points raised here revolve around moral/intellectual support. Has anyone tried, as a single founder, to work in tandem with another single founder? (i.e.: two startups, one roof)
I'm very curious about this tsumobi thing, as it's basically exactly what Hecl is ( http://www.hecl.org ). I'd sort of abbandoned it as an idea for making any money with directly, though, figuring the advantage was just to be able to develop applications a lot faster. I was able to prototype ShopList ( http://shoplist.dedasys.com ) in a few minutes with it, for example.

Edit: BTW, I'd certainly be interested in chatting with the Tsumobi folks. It's a good idea - perhaps there are elements in common that can be reused from/added to Hecl, which is open source under a very liberal license, meaning you can take it and include it even in 'commercial' apps.

I really think that the 'common' bits in a space like that have to be either free or open source (think about browsers, html, javascript, java applets, etc...), and that that's not where the money is.
Maybe I'm out of touch, but I don't perceive bloggers to be "rivals".

Links show what the author is reading. If I can relate to him, then I will likely read the post to see what it adds to the discussion.
I don't think the lack of an idea patent is discouraging anyone from pursuing startups. If someone had a truly great idea, they would pursue it and patent the implementation.

Ideas patent would just result in a patent for every trivial idea out there, severely limiting people who can actually execute it.
Facebook Group - Startup School 2007
A nice podcast with the author of "Founders at Work" (Jessica Livingstone)
I am Jawad Shuaib on there. Introduce yourself as well :)
"perhaps it should only be accessible by top users [...]"

Boy, I don't like that idea. I don't think content control will be a huge problem with YC News. We are all like-minded individuals here. The last thing we need is senseless aristocracy.
Creating Passionate Users: You ARE a marketer. Deal with it.
News as a social play: Here comes MySpace News
I am, well... it shouldn't be too hard to match me to my user name here.
Great submission, thanks. Just finished my fourth interview in this book tonight.
My Yahoo! Gets Web 2.0 Makeover
I definitely recommend FireBug. It is, as the article states, a dream extension for Firefox. After it becomes second nature to use, you'll wonder how you got by without it. (Probably quite fine, but the app is great!)
61 Interviews with Founders of Web 2.0 Websites
Looks awesome! My favorite are,

Writewith: Google docs is a great application. But it is very limiting when it comes to collaboration. I have recently setup an article with an editor and 6 contributing authors; I know the collaboration on Google docs for such a project is going to be hell.

Octopart: I love vertical search engines since they have the potential to compete with mainstream search engines. Moreover, as an engineer and electronics enthusiast, I've always had trouble locating components, so Octopart will certainly come in handy. In fact, I am going to go ahead and recommend it to my EE friends.

Auctomatic: I am not a power user on eBay, but from the sound of it, this startup really has something going for them. There is a definite need for streamlining the process of listing on eBay. The downside is that their exit strategy is limited to eBay and perhaps a few other smaller companies.
"In the world today, there's plenty of technology, plenty of entrepreneurs, plenty of money, plenty of venture capital. What's in short supply is great teams. Your biggest challenge will be building a great team. There's enormous change underway in every facet of the world. Some is technology driven, some is market driven. All that change creates unprecedented opportunity. But to take full advantage of those opportunities, focus on the team. Teams win."

I'll refer future askers of "Do I need a co-founder" to that. They can get what they will from that.

I've been reading Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work and these interviews have pretty much reaffirmed that statement from Doerr. The perseverance and the great team relationships involved are what made some of these early startups. Without that, sometimes you're just a guy with a great idea.
Yeah, the times that Moore's Law has "become irrelevant" are usually the same times that it has become as "applicable as ever." People just love to announce!
From http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html:

"3. Marginal Niche

Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition."

---

Usually the problem isn't that the market is too big, it's that the company is too scattered in focus. If you know your product well and you know its target, big playing fields are not a problem. You can be a small niche player and still be all over the place in delivery.
Not the best article, and this frankly this has been discussed to death.

Still, I'll say it here too. There's not a bubble because this is not a fad wave. The iconic Web 2.0-style and buzz words will fade with time, but this is a natural evolution of the web. The "next generation" of websites will soon just be known as the "current generation."

Products are actually being delivered and money is being made. It's real popular right now, as things tend to get -- but there's not going to be a pop.
You definitely need a constant drive, but I don't think it has to be fear.

The fear you should have is not being able to make rent or buy food. You should fear having to go back to your cubicle job or the lecture hall at school. Know that a startup lifestyle is for you, and fear going back to the life you didn't want. Fear these and that will keep you reaching to succeed.
Startup School Dilemma
I just realized a business plan competition I entered is on March 24th too, the competition is pretty weak and the top two prizes are $5k and $1.5k plus some legal and accounting work (about $2k-$4k worth), I'm thinking about having one of my friends present for me, but its not the same as the passion I have for it. (although I still think it has a decent shot of winning if he presents it) I already bought my plane ticket for Startup School....what would you do?
I will hopefully get "Founders at Work" by March 14th. It is actually a birthday gift from my sister :p (along with 3 other books). I can't wait to get my hands on it `:D
I would attend the competition if I felt I had a strong chance.
I clicked 'reply' to recommend you an interview to start with, since I began reading out of order.

But no need -- start from the beginning and work your way in. They're all gems. There's a nice introduction from pg himself too.
Thank you danielha! keep up the great posts
I thought using my full name as my user name would make it easier to meet the new community. I wonder if anyone actually reads it as Daniel_Ha. :)

(you're welcome, Jawad)
I haven't, though it slightly rings a bell. I referred to the Wikipedia article on it and it reports a US pilot has just been filmed last month. I'll keep my eye on that one.
I read about this on a post titled "MySpace News: The Digg Killer?" The comments on Mashable are worth checking out:

http://mashable.com/2007/03/08/myspace-news/

By their own contention, MySpace is a "place for friends". I am not sure what NewsCorp has in mind, but this is certainly not a direction that will appeal to teens. Companies that try to appeal to everyone end up losing market share to smaller more focused startups.
Actually, Daniel, I thought about it but then I wasn't sure if your name is Daniel or Daniela (male vs. female). Sorry :p
All man, man.
That's awesome Daniel! I am currently busy reading "Small is the new big", "The Wisdom of Crowds" and "Unleashing the ideavirus" but I will drop all these as soon as this book arrives. I hope the content is thought provoking.
I'll be there. I'm from St Louis, MO, so it'll be refreshing to get out of the midwest ;)
The best way to build a company is not by going after an existing category, but by creating a new category you can be first in. In the struggle for life, no two startups can occupy the same position. If they try to do so, one company will drive the other to extinction.

Now this does not mean that you can go ahead and invent some "obscure niche". A startup that serves a market too small and of little interest may never gain the traction to reach a tipping point.

Competition is a good thing. It takes a George Foreman to make a Muhammad Ali. Strong competition validates the smaller player. I will go as far as to suggest that without Digg, Reddit would've had a difficult time gaining wide angle attention from the blogosphere. However, competition should be avoided where it makes sense. In other words, don't consciously look for it.
See you there (from Florida).
O'Reilly Previews Freebase ("appears to be a bastard child of wikipedia and the Open Directory Project")
It sounds a lot like the idea I was going to apply to YC with, bugger.

If you want fast prototyping for mobile I'd recommend using python on a nokia S60. Theres pretty much a full hardware api allowing you to access the camera, phone book, etc.
not me. IMO the connections and perspective of startup school would be more valuable than the presentation ('course I don't know exactly who you're presenting to so I could be wrong). Not to minimize the difficulty of pulling together money sometimes, but it seems that if your idea is worth much it shouldn't be a big deal drumming up 10k somewhere else.
Man Daniel. I'm going to be up all night.
I'm not dismissing the benefits of Startup School (I'm excited to be attending myself); however, if I constructed a business plan that I believed to be a winner, I would see it through to the end myself.
Hecl doesn't require Symbian, though - you can run it even on cheaper phones like my Nokia 3100.
When to buy what in a start-up, and who pays for it?