skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
how about a captcha that records the movement of the mouse. for example, trace this image or make five circles in a row.
So very useful. These are issues we all have to parse through and while you note it's not a magic formula, it's certainly a good one to understand as a young entrepreneur. Thanks.
Nate Westheimer
BricaBox.com
Well said. This is something that most of us actually start to experience after finishing the development phase and starting to market our products. Sure, everyone knows that marketing is critical, but when it comes time to experience it first hand, it gets you to a deeper level of appreciation for the fact.

Like you said, word of mouth is the best marketing approach if you can achieve it. I can think of three ways to get there:

- Viral Features: The most know examples are social networks and other social Web sites, but there are many others that aren't exactly social but they do have viral features. For example, Paypal. If you want to send money to someone, they'll have to create a Paypal account as well.

- A Well Known Brand: That's obvious. If you're a big company or a well known celebrity in the tech industry everyone will be happy to cover your news. If you don't have a well known brand, then try to associate yourself with someone who does.

- A WOW feature: Anything that amazes people and gets them to tell their friends about your product falls under this category. The first thing that comes to mind is Google Maps. When it first came out it was so amazing that everyone called their friends to show them.

P.S. I'd like to read your essay when you finish it.
I meant Boston, but presumably it's worse everywhere else on the East Coast.
The approach that works best for me is to just start building it :).

In all seriousness though, this is truly the case. I surmise that most of us already have a platform of choice. I know I do. So once that is taken care of, just go ahead and start.

In terms of how do you start, I think it is most effective to work on the critical functionality path. Just do everything that is absolutely critical to make it functional.

In terms of where do you start along the critical functionality path, I approach it from the user perspective. First I need the login screen or whatever. OK, I need to build the ability to login. Then the next thing the user is going to want to do is X, so I need to make X work.

With this process you get from nothing to something functional in little time, and then you can just build from there. I have been on projects where we talk it through first, and even spec, but in my experience this is a waste of time for small projects at all but the highest level. Almost immediately when you start building it you notice things you didn't in the talking stage.

I'm interested in what other people do, but this has always worked for me. Of course, I like to work alone :). But it has worked with other people too. You just break up critical functional tasks the way they naturally break up.
IPhone Flaw Lets Hackers Take Over, Security Firm Says
side note-- I am really starting to get miffed by blog/page layouts that are so widget-heavy that I can't view the content until sixteen separate widgets have polled their (slow) servers and rendered.

Please let me view the content, and THEN render your widgets! Don't block!
What the new Patent Reform Act means for small startups
Will Boston ever catch up?
This was in yesterday's Boston Globe business section, about how Boston VCs are comparatively clueless about consumer Internet startups, relative to Silicon Valley.
I use the Nike process: JUST DO IT!
Startup company Ceravision has 50% efficient microwave light bulb
Startup company Ceravision Ltd. (Milton Keynes, England) has said it has invented a 50% efficient microwave-powered light bulb that is more efficient than filament (5% efficient) or fluorescent (15% efficient) lighting and with a long stable lamp life.
Interview with Simon Daniel founder of USBCELL, one of the best startups of the year.
An interview with the founder of an amazing startup.
Anybody can start a company, but getting, staying at top takes resilience
The Nike Software Engineering Process
YouTube - Bill Gates Blue Screen of Death
MA's Opsware bought by HP for $1.6B
that's supposed to be "know" not "now". Though technically I do not now own a significant percentage in anything incorporated :-P
getting easier != equivalent

This is a joke, right?
The Real Problem With Alexa (a rant from the founder of Slashdot)
You can set the threshold or turn off the hiding of downmodded comments on reddit.
C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
Well, it's an urban legend in any case:

http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
I've noticed facebook always reports 'active' user numbers. Any idea how many myspace accounts are active as opposed to abandoned or spam?
Most of the things published in 1st tier conferences are useless outside of academia. In my current field (computer graphics) this is glaringly obvious.
We've just launched a consumer oriented website. We started by identifying the key features that were necessary to get to monetization. Then the whole thing was mocked up in Powerpoint with EVERY hyperlink included. From there we developed functional specs for the site. At this point it went off to the developers and we continued to work on the details - which photos, what text to include in which emails etc. We put together an excel spread sheet for QA that allowed us to test and track the bugs. As things changed, we updated the specs so we would have good documentation about what has been modified. Documentation is important because down the road when this becomes a big company, it will be easier for new developers coming in to get up to speed. I'll confess though, that some of our documentation is emails.. which are stored with the requirement docs.
I agree, I initially tried looking at the page on my iPhone while I was outside on the EDGE network. It took forever as I watched all the flash stuff in the sidebar not load. Then the article itself appeared in the sidebar as one big link.

It would have been nice if there was a content-only URL that could have been linked to from news.yc.
The universe is not static. And demands and supplies are particularly dynamic. Intuitively I see no reason why penetration percentage can't wax and wane with time due to changes in supplies, demands, populations, behaviors etc.

He obviously understands the implications of shifts in demand given his "what you count" argument. Why bother stating a "law" if you can see its own holes?
Interesting take, epi0Bauqu. I think many hackers struggle with this concept because we are so focused on the creation, that once the product is created we are not sure what's next. And even if we do know, it oftentimes isn't as aligned with our core skills as the creation part is.
Some random stuff that works for me:

1. refactor often
2. avoid code duplication
3. test everything
4. even if you hate docs, it's good to have some written specs, or even better, some initial tests.
Has anyone who has submitted their company to TC20 heard from them yet?
We submitted our startup to TC20 and all we have received so far from them is a single email confirming that they have received the application. We have not had any other contact. We haven't even seen any activity on our site that was listed in the application. Has anyone else heard from them? Hope this wasn't a scam ;-).
Probably Alexa is only useful in watching the trend of a single site, rather than comparing sites, or looking at the absolute numbers.
Researchers seek cash for software flaws
Ads on paulgraham.com -- Check the bottom of any PG essay
Interesting YC startup plugging in "relevant ads". Check the bottom of any PG essay i.e.: http://paulgraham.com/writing44.html
Hmm. That's pretty good, I guess. How many Jr. Bacon Cheeseburgers is that?
At work, it takes 15 minutes to fully build the application. If the system I'm building is sufficiently small, I go ahead and code it right away and simplify as it's built.

If the system is large (for example, I'm currently building something which is around 1000+ lines) I write a functional spec first, figuring out the high level design and a few nitty-gritty lower level things. This helps simplify things because you can see exactly how two pieces that look similar can be split off into one piece.
Its plastered all over paulgraham.com, not just the essays. I personally like the ad free version of paulgraham.com :). I wonder if adpinion is another YC startup.
Interesting excerpt from the article:

"Does this add credence to Apple's position that 3rd party applications are not allowed on the iPhone for security reasons?

We don't think so. Almost all of the security engineering effort on the iPhone seems to have been spent protecting the revenue model, rather than protecting the user (which is, of course, an entirely understandable position). For example, a constrained environment is used to prevent users from loading new ringtones onto the phone, but the applications are not run in a constrained environment to contain damage caused by hackers who exploit them."
Andreessen's Opsware (formerly LoudCloud) sold for $1.6 Billion to HP
Yep. Why else would I do it?
Sorry for my ignorance, how can one calculate his company value ?
Selling out for kicks and giggles?

PS: Reddit for ads sounds clever, but still won't get me to click them.
I got a chuckle that you had to link to Adpinion, because practically every page on paulgraham.com has already been submitted.
So what kind of information can the adpinion guys extract if someone downvotes every single ad?
This is true to a certain extent, but on the flipside, Google does have to optimize. What may be a "bottom-of-the-list" revenue generating opportunity for them may be a cash cow for a one or two person team.
Get rid of "any" kind of ad from that page coz its annoying the hell out of visitor(s) :).
This is the same night as the TechCrunch party ... might be a small amount of overlap
ssh on iPhone - Cool
Who Will Make How Much on Facebook?
Amazingly detailed guesswork. Who knows if it's right, but it's at least interesting.
(from http://lauren.vortex.com/googler-lyrics )

"Our data store of your actions makes NSA's look just like toys,"

bet their pr folks love that one.
Actually that's what the system would do. Why expend
bandwidth annoying people?
It's only useful for watching the trend of a single site within the Alexa demographic. It might not reflect the site's overall trend.
A Call for More Innovation in Voice Services: time to disrupt the telcos
"It uses a broken methodology to measure the internet and is, for reasons unclear to anyone, regarded as somehow definitive simply because it allows you to compare two sites with a single simple number."

As opposed to IQ, GPA, SATs, LOC, Meyers-Briggs, Megapixels, Megahertz, Merit Badges, Horsepower, US News Rank, Karma points, etc.?

Someone should really write down some theory on what can be measured and what can't be measured. You'd think we'd have some idea after 2,500+ years of philosophy, but it doesn't much seem that way.
all of those processes arose precisely because "just do it" doesn't scale. even for a small team, things like functional specs and other plans can save a lot of suffering (e.g. joel spolsky's 'painless functional specs' and other writings -- http://joelonsoftware.com )
How would you improve Spotplex?  It's a cool idea but it (still!) has implementation problems.
Well, we know what we have to do, now that you've given away the secret :~).
Top social networks for engagement - some suprises
This will be an interesting experiment to watch. Its taking the reddit/digg style voting to the world of internet ads and hoping that users will tell what kind of ads they want to see. If every user is like me, it'll mean no ads... maybe everyone is not like me.
e7: a new Lisp dialect inspired by Python
Also see http://e7code.org/
Functional specs are like business plans - time consuming, rapidly made redundant and extrinsic to the street fight of running a startup.
Also see http://e7code.org/
Hm, interesting, but slightly weird concept. If the users are willing to vote actively for their favorite ads, why not let them do it on your homepage to begin with?

On the other hand, why voting, isn't click/no click sufficient information to judge the effectiveness of ads (seems to work for Google Adwords)?
In "why is sex fun" I read that gathering is actually much more efficient than hunting (and people worked an average of 6 hours/day - for the society in that study anyway). One theory then stated that the point of hunting was to be a bigshot now and then, which would enable you to seduce more women. It still seems to be the major motivator for making a career today...
"Programmers and software engineers who dive into code without writing a spec tend to think they're cool gunslingers, shooting from the hip. They're not. They are terribly unproductive. They write bad code and produce shoddy software, and they threaten their projects by taking giant risks which are completely uncalled for."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html

i agree that you shouldn't be writing three-ring-bound tomes, but spending a few hours planning out exactly what the thing will _do_ (just the 'what'; not even the 'how') usually teases out problems that you'd only find a few weeks into winging it.
The Web is inherently an inadequate application development platform.
Is this even a valid argument today?
Is Cambridge the new hub of Northeast startups?
The online video experience
To make tens upon tens of dollars!
"What's missing is the support necessary for large-scale application development."

This is exactly what Google Web Toolkit aims to solve. But its amazingly under-appreciated and I'm still not sure why.. I suspect the learning curve is a put-off to many developers. Or simply b/c it uses Java, that could also be it.

"The only way to fix many of these issues would be to strip away the browser, to strip away JavaScript, to change the nature of HTTP and the related conventions."

Supposedly HTML5 aims to do some of this. W3C is reconsidering this new standard to address some of the inherent problems being described.
A Talk With VCMike
Mike Hirshland of Boston-based Polaris Venture Partners was in San Francisco recently, and so I had a little chat with him, part of my ongoing series: Meet the VCs, so you can fight or flee when you see them at parties.
If you're in NYC next month (Aug. 14, to be exact), you might be interested in Perry Metzger's presentation:

"Otter, a new dialect of Lisp. Otter is strongly influenced by Scheme and Python, with some bits of inspiration from Common Lisp, Perl and other languages thrown in, as well as some strange ideas Perry came up up with on his own."

(see the LispNYC site for details on the meeting: http://lispnyc.org/home.clp)
I prefer questions of the genre, "Please implement a hashmap on the white board."
Hi ph0rque, the theory is that even the most ardent of ad-downvoters would eventually like an ad enough to not down it (or, that they would get bored of compulsive negativity, and start being more selective). That one ad would be an extremely valuable piece of information.
-Luke
It's all about the Hamiltons.
Joel's background is Micro$oft and Yale. He has a traditional approach to software engineering. MS is not a hub of innovation and never has been:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116490323676636989-Hn...

Here's Dave Winer in that WSJ article:

"Microsoft isn't an innovator, and never was. They are always playing catch-up, by design. That's their M.O. They describe their development approach as "chasing tail lights." They aren't interested in markets until they're worth billions, so they let others develop the markets, and have been content to catch-up. This worked well for them in the 80s and through the mid-90s, when they were a more nimble company with stock options that were attractive to bright young people, when Bill G had something to prove, and was current on the latest technology. Maybe it still does work (obviously I have doubts), but it sure isn't innovation, in any usual sense of the word."

Scoble from the same article:

"I agree that they don't do big things that are innovative, and this leads to disconnects as to what innovation is." [Typical ex-microsoftie trying to change the meaning of the word innovation]

Google's dev mantra is "release early, release often". There's an important business reason they do this - to get apps out in front of the customer very early to find out if there's any interest in them at all. Most of the apps are Beta and many of them have horrible bugs. If that makes them gunslingers, then I'll take my chances as a gunslinger.

The problem I have with your last paragraph: "but spending a few hours planning out exactly what the thing will _do_ (just the 'what'; not even the 'how') usually teases out problems that you'd only find a few weeks into winging it" is the following:

Sometimes you don't know what's possible. If you sit down and write an english description for a few hours, you're only drawing on your existing knowledge. I'd rather my developers sit down and write code for 3 hours to see if somethings possible. That way they may come up with a completely original idea.

You're focusing on finding problems with software rather than creating something new and useful and potentially ground-breaking. There's a time for finding problems - it's called QA and it happens after product already exists.

Writing software isn't hard. For a good developer it's just as easy as writing a spec. JUST DO IT!

Mark.
Actually it uses Google coop, but the basic idea is the same.
...just like the first microprocessors were.
Thin Websites Sell More
No More Payment! How To Add FeedBurner Site Stats To Your Blog
I'd actually extend the "startup corridor" out to include most of the Red Line, from South Station to Davis (and possibly to Alewife, soon). There're a bunch of financial startups in the financial district between Downtown Crossing and South Station - I interviewed at one and work at another. And the Porter/Davis area was the birthplace of a number of yCombinator startups, notably Reddit. Many of them are now in Silicon Valley, granted, but they tend to get started near Davis where rents are low.
Oh snap! I went to some random PG essay to see which ad agency PG would put up and was immediately disappointed to see an ad for Mortgages, which was entirely off-base for the page, but then an up/down mod appeared! What?! That was awesome! Down clicking made a 'Sorry' box appear and the ad was gone! Huzzah!

But still, what will happen when an advertisement that a group pays for is consistently down-modded into oblivion, essentially nullifying any chance for it to appear? How will the YC startup handle the irate company? I know an answer would be that they should change their advertisements, but still, some companies may get angry at the YC startup that the money they payed for advertisement didn't do any good. How will they handle that situation? I'm guessing the advertisements are charged on a per-click bases, but is there a base charge, or tiered pricing for size of initial random viewing of web-pages registered with the company?

If the YC startup can't fulfill a promise of at least some level of ad-viewer-ship, then why should a company have their ads go through them?
What Makes Techmeme Tick? Gabe Rivera Explains
Why Feedburner is trouble, day 2
A first look at IronRuby
What kind of application takes 15 minutes to fully build? (I'm genuinely curious - not sarcasm).
I wonder when people are going to get it. We have been talking about "IN-vertising" for ever but NO, NO, NO. We still want to guess what the user wants. No software can tell what a user wants better than the user him/herself. I believe we should spend more time and resources providing users with services that let the user initially decide the ads they want. For me send anything that rhymes with coffee, mobility, startups and thick women. Block the other ads. If I feel like buying a car in the next few weeks, then let me pull the firefox or IE plugin and tell it to serve me a few VW Golf ads and listings. Would it be hard to build such a plugin?
Loved the article, though I have to wonder how useful this "Founders at Home" stuff is -- I read all the time, as do most of my friends, but most of my more entrepreneurial acquaintances don't have the time. It isn't stated in the article, but having a huge library is probably something you should do either before you start or after you sell out.
So, what you're saying is "Who would want to be rewarded based on performance, given that some people won't perform well?" I guess I might be irate if I said "Let my customers tell me how good my ads are," and the answer was "They suck," but wouldn't I be better off knowing, or at least having the option to know?
Guy Kawasaki & Tim Berry: How to Write a Business Plan - 10 Questions
good read
One thing I will give the YC guys though is that you can make some hell of user friendly website. I know what the site does within 5 seconds. Anyone has a few spare hours to spend on my website?
maybe i'm getting trolled here :) but i don't see how joel's background makes his points less relevant:
- it's easier to fix problems on sketches/paper than in code weeks later
- specs cut down on amount of communication needed -- especially with outside stakeholders
- and help with schedule estimates, etc.

sure, in your typical web 2.0 app, many things are easy to re-work, but others (e.g. end-to-end unicode support/other i18n issues, scaling, schema design, etc.) are better baked in from the beginning (just ask friendster.) or at least be cognizant of the tradeoffs you're making and budget time to throw away your prototype.

also, google and ms have pretty rigorous software engineering processes and tools (hell, they hired GvR just to write a code review tool.) sure, in the early days it was probably looser. but not zero structure whatsoever -- the total free-for-all that "just do it" implies -- hell, even "release early and often" is a kind of software engineering discipline.

there are benefits to cutting corners (i.e. the zero planning implied by "just do it") like getting to market faster for certain kinds of startups (early market feedback, etc.) but these come at a cost later on! i like dharmesh shah's idea of 'technology debt':

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/165/Development-Sh...

and your assertion that QA is something that happens only after a product already exists is equally misguided -- you can save a lot of time overall by thinking early about how to structure and instrument your code to make it easy to test.

if your response is 'well of COURSE you'd think about all these things up front', then that's not really 'just do it', is it :)
i think it would be interesting to see how much of it is dependent on content _columns_ being thin vs. the entire site being thin.
If the entire site is not thin then your eyes still have to wonder side to side right? I actually think this makes perfect sense
Yes, a reasonable person would be glad to have such feedback, but I was more curious of the Marketing Management reaction who would look at their ad click-through's and notice that they aren't that high for a service they just paid money for, or that they're ads aren't even being viewed anywhere at all.

I was just asking how an online advertising service, especially a small startup, handle such things.
Rob Malda vs Alexa vs Slashdot vs Digg
No, the old one.
Is this true for all industries???
Cool. Interested in PG's take on it.
It's an exciting idea because it has that magic "Why didn't anyone do this before" feel to it. That's always a good sign. Good luck. I haven't had any coffee yet but I totally missed the voting thumbs on the left, and I was looking for them. Not sure if that's good or bad though.