skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally, part of the enjoyment I get out of browsing user submitted content is the lack of advertisements and marketing. As marketers begin to embrace and slowly creep their ads into the majority of such content, I wonder how communities will react.

I know I'd be turned away.
It's a visibility thing. Millions of circuit breakers trip in homes every year. Not news. Millions of homes go dark at once? News.

Hosted apps have a risk (coordinated failure) that desktop apps generally do not. 100,000 hard drives don't all crash at once.

Also remember that it's in the interests of journalists to assume a tone of authority, to write in a way that mimics reasoned analysis: "this is part of a recent trend". It's a little gratuitous, but it's not unnecessary bashing.
This is no PR stunt. Auctomatic are living out of suitcases atm and we're pretty pissed.
Hello Kitty Banana cover: The most useless finished product you will ever see
Maybe it's time YCombo also bought some property.
Value Acceleration
What do you think of them, though? I don't really like them, but perhaps it just takes some getting used to. Google and Yahoo are different, because I don't even now the words they are derived from. But the others - it's weird that those misspellings will probably become normal words if the startup is really successful. Perhaps they'll even replace the correctly spelled words.

Then again, if the exist strategy is getting bought by Google or Yahoo, perhaps the name doesn't matter much - it can be changed after the acquisition anyway (ie scripts.google.com).
Oracle shafting thousands of AppForge customers
Wholeheartedly disagree. You can turn a worthless domain into a valuable one.

Can you really count on people manually typing in familiar urls today? Even organic search results are not as crucial as they once were.
although I agree that we should be happy to be free, I believe this article has too much sleight of hand. Yes we should be happy about having the lifestyles we do, but should we be happy enough to overlook the recent behavior of our government?
Banned from Adsense? What's Your Blog Advertising Alternative?
YC Jamglue's Growth and Scaling
Sounds like an opportunity to rent a large house and create a YC 'frat house' of sorts
Six Basic Truths of Free APIs
That's really cool - especially as it seems kind of fun to participate in creating names.

A problem is of course giving away the idea, but often one can probably formulate it general enough to not do much harm.
it must be someone else (we're exiled in berkeley but haven't yet been evicted from san francisco) but, personally, i think the situation is absurd-what percentage of this place was filled by referrals from justin.tv?
top priority for me - port to other players. After that, video and flash demo.

There are links to 3 screenshots on the details page.

Thanks for the link, I am surprised it is by W3C!

I disagree with them. Will your grandma recognize a hyperlink intuitively?

My web page is for people like her (rhetorically speaking).
In that case, the smart thing to do is like that other landlord story -- offer to invest! Give them free rent in exchange for the option to also buy a small percentage of the company.
My only interaction with them is through yahoo games.
I have moved from yahoo mail to gmail a few month after it was released (it took me a while because invitations were still a bit difficult to get).

So when is google going to make online chess without the annoying banner ads that yahoo plasters all over the damn thing?
Yet Another YCombinator Clone
as an IP lawyer frequently adverse to MSFT, i can assure you that it is not dead quite yet. on the essay itself, as thoughtful as we have come to expect, I suppose the relevant question is what will the next "black swan" event be?
SmugMug on Amazon S3: Outages, slowdowns, and problems
The way they use S3 for cold storage and their local servers for hot storage is really interesting.... A lot like some of the things people have been discussing regarding memory vs. DB (yes, this link was grabbed from inside the jamglue article)
This works both ways. There are lots of laws that are easy to violate and exist almost entirely so unpopular people can get sued (Michael Milken was barred for life from the securities business and fined $600 million for violating an obscure regulation that cost shareholders an estimated $300,000).

Options backdating is tricky, because the cost of backdating is reflected in the company's financial statements whether or not they announce it. It's like paying employees less than standard wages, but giving them lavish perks -- it's all the same on the income statement, so it's closer to PR than to lying.
It's not enough to be different, your customers expect more
Wow! Weebly.com Is a "Sexy Business"
Web 2.0 - The Best Personal News Site
Sounds like good news to me. YC can't pick every good team, and can't be the right fit for every good team. Highland seems to be specifically seeking life sciences and what looks like some more techie (non-software) ideas.

They seem to have their dates confused in the article, though. How can this program have "just launched" if the application due date was 11 days ago?
The War for Talent Is Back
Somewhere down the line you're going to sink many $K into marketing, I don't see why paying for a domain name that already has some traffic and name recognition is a categorically bad idea.

Was it a bad deal for 'freedrive.com'? Depends on the specifics of the situation and how the company leverages their name recognition.
This might be a practical joke. Not an especially good one, but it's so over the top that I have a sneaking suspicion someone is having a laugh about all the indignity this post has generated.
Pure genius!!! Seriously, I can't get over the brilliance of that invention.
you just give them your idea in a sentence or two and they fly with it. Also I had my new name in 24 hours, which is pretty cool and fast, especially when you where supposed to choose a domain yesterday...
What makes you think that the price is $4,500? In almost all cases, these prices are very negotiable. Keep in mind that the owner probably paid less than $10 for it. Even considering overhead, $200 is a very good return on the sellers investment.

Here's how I would go about negotiating the price:

Subject: Interested in buying a domain name
Date: 2007-04-28
To: squatter1; squatter2; squatter3; ... ; squatter50

I am thinking about purchasing one of the following
domains. According to the WHOIS information, you are the
owner of one or more of them. If you are interested in
selling, please reply back with domain name and the price
you want for it. In order to give everybody enough time to
respond, I will wait a few days collect the responses I get
before I make a decision. I promise I will not disclose
your offer to anybody.

Thank you!

domain1.com - squatter1
domain2.com - squatter2
...
domain50.com - squatter50

Subject: RE: Interested in buying a domain name
Date: 2007-05-10
To: squatter

Thanks for your reply. I cannot afford the price you gave
me. If you still are interested in selling, please reply
back with a smaller price. Thanks again!

Subject: RE: Interested in buying a domain name
Date: 2007-05-25
From: me
To: squatter

Thanks for your numerous replies. I guess my expectations
are unrealistic because I didn't want to pay more than $100
for this project. I am not interested in the other
variations (.net, .org, etc.) you offered me. Please let me
know if you will accept $100 for just .com.

Subject: RE: Interested in buying a domain name
Date: 2007-05-30
From: me
To: squatter

Sorry, $ is too much for me. I will pay $200 if you throw
in the other variations too. I want to finish this up soon
so please reply back with the payment/escrow information.
This isn't news; it was posted here several weeks ago.
weak!
Maybe the owners are disgruntled Y Rejects?

I don't quite understand why anyone would not want "free" press. The only thing I could think of is perhaps 'doing business' from the property might break a 'zoning' law of a sort.
Giving value is what makes a good web application, but how to do it?
Holy crap, I hope not!
Wireless Startups Searching for VC Dollars
2 options

1. launch now
2. start a blog about the event

nice-side-effect: get the rest of the world tuned into the idea and create a ton of competition in the space.
Amateurs. I could do it with a single Nintendo Wii.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?z=1&h=300&w=610&h=400&w=700&site0=jamglue.com&site1=likebetter.com&site2=&site3=&site4=&range=6m&size=Medium&y=r&z=1&url=jamglue.com&x=0&y=0 IT is a lie Jamglue is not growing

Most yc companies are dead
Red Hat Ruthlessly Reduces Complexity
That's effectively like a continuous deadline then: "Always Be Coding".

Deadlines are another form of advance planning, kind of a way to tell yourself to clear your schedule of distractions. I think it applies more to obligations you have trouble with dedicating time toward -- you don't really need to plan to do stuff you want to do :)
Amazon outsources its shipping services
building a workplace that attracts and keeps great people is especially important now because the job market for skilled people is so hot.

I think it's kind of sad that it isn't seen as a worthy goal in itself, but indicated merely because of a hot job market. The implication is that you should treat people as poorly as you can get away with.

I think PG is right in that someday people will view jobs the same way we view serfdom.
Not only can't YC pick every good team, but they have a bias towards certain types of start-ups: fairly simple websites (reddit, octopart, pollground, etc.).

CRV loans up to $250k which opens up a wider range of start-up possibilities. E.g. if you are working on something involving hardware; remember Apple really got moving with a $250k line of credit backed by Mike Markkula (consumer price index says $250k in 1977 is about $855k in 2006 dollars).
Useless. Extrinsic motivation will never get someone to work productively for 80 hours a week.

After somewhere around 30-ish it's gotta be intrinsic desire-to-make-thing-better, not 'ooh I get paid more'
Anyone interested in setting up a blog for web 2.0 app updates?  Pretty well any update would be accepted.
But of course, to avoid excessive promotion, we could have a limit of one update per week for each app.
So many are searching for A round funding.. but are many actually getting it?

Basically, curious on the general opinion of wireless startups among VCs. "Next technology frontier" or "You're still the carriers bitch"...
Wow, way cool. Some friends ran a small business for years that could really have used this!
Will Ferrell created a short in which Dora receives a call from her friend Alec Baldwin.  What was Boots thinking when he heard the message?
Amazon S3: Show me the money
The Perfect DB Storage Array
Flickr far superior to SmugMug?
Actually we'll take any promising startup, and some of the most promising we've funded weren't "simple websites." Particularly Loopt, Xobni, Textpayme and an as-yet unlaunched database startup.

Though frankly, Octopart isn't exactly a "simple website" either. It's a search engine, and in some ways more complicated than Google. Is Google a "simple website?"
(If so, bring 'em on.)
Amazon, VCs Woo Seattle-area Developers
Sure. This was mentioned last Friday, too, I think. :) I've emailed you.
Wakoopa: Last.fm For Desktop Applications
Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?
I'm thinking about the YC question, "why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate? My partner and I could duplicate any given YC company, feature-for-feature, quickly. So, to first order, the answer to this question is, "It's not hard."

But just duplicating can't be the real worry here. Is the underlying question, "Why won't your competitors quickly duplicate what you're building?"
Will Ferrell created a short in which Dora receives a call from her friend Alec Baldwin. What was Boots thinking when he heard the message?
http://teenwag.com/playvideo/4921
My guess: the owners are uncomfortable with the privacy implications of Justin.TV. After all, everyone that Justin encounters ends up being broadcast live over the Internet. Many other tenants in the YScraper may not want to end up with their mugshot on the net. This also explains why they would evict anyone who regularly comes in contact with Justin: if they're friends with Justin, then Justin is likely to come over and visit, with potentially negative privacy implications for other tenants.
Is .mobi accepted yet or should mobile startups use a .com?
How to Get Higher P/E Multiples for a Site You Might Sell
Running a search on a few catalogs is orders of magnitude less complex than searching the entire web. I don't know what tricks they may have up their sleeves, but it looks like a normal keyword search.

For example, use the suggested "red led" search and compare octopart to newark. With newark you select criteria that apply to the part; with octopart you "keep quoting" "keywords" "to:narrow" "it down" and you can't select a range -- like a range of voltage, for example. I'm not sure if you can even "or" a few keywords together to get a range.

There's nothing wrong with it, I'm just saying it isn't that complex. Reddit is cloneable in a weekend (remember all the "reddit in 20 lines of Lisp" posts after it switched to Python) and most likely owes its popularity to you personally; it had a good foundation because its earliest users were your readers.

Obviously it was a smart investment. I'm just saying it wasn't a hard technical problem. The barrier to getting a large (smart) audience was solved by having a PG to promote it. You're (personally) essentially a catalyst, like start-up yeast.
The consumer price index might hold true for hardware but how will you justify it for software ??
It's hard to get users, particularly if you are not the first in a given area.
Top 10 Lies told by Clients
I had the perfect domain name - but it was a .net. We even had the perfect logo for it. But everyone in the biz told me I needed a .com, even my mom. So I spent a few hours with a thesaurus and came up with a shortlist, and of the ones available, the best was offered by BuyDomains.com for $2,500. I mentioned it to my investors and my parents and they said BUY IT NOW. My team was less enthusiastic about the name, but they understood why it was good:
- .com
- 5 letters, 2 syllables
- easy to pronounce and spell
- the name made sense for our business, it wasn't nonsense

I went for it and I'm really glad I did. Would I do it for $3K? Not sure. $4K? I don't want to think about it.
LawYours  Connecting Startups and Lawfirms 5/10/07
That's a damn good response to a critical writeup. My favorite part of the "we're not targeting the same audience" defense is that no matter what the company says the subtext is always "until we are and we take all their users away".
News.YC Traffic So Far
The big spike is people clicking on reload the day we responded to applications.
Half of that spike was probably me.
They reduced the complexity of a license agreement. I thought they reduced that bloated feeling I get whenever I try their distro. Ah well, hopefully that's next on their list.
If someone wants to copy a YC company that's m months old, a copy-cat site could be build in ~ m months. None of the YC companies seem to have a "secret sauce" that would take years to develop. (And I'm not saying they should.)

Since the answer to the duplication question is universally "no", why put it on the application? What is the subtext that I am missing?
Possible BUG? Why does this thread say n comments, and I only see n-1?
Deleted spams.
In the justin.tv archives, there is footage of underage people drinking alcohol, people throwing other people into the swimming pool, all night parties, the cops showing up with guns drawn, etc. The building is also not zoned as live/work. This particular landlord is a scumbag, but the tenants have video evidence of illegal activities and breaking zoning codes, so the management is not unwarranted in giving them the boot.

Someone burglarized my apartment once, so I called the cops. the neighbors had dogs, and the dogs were barking at the cops. The cops pounded on the neighbor's door and told them to shut their dogs up while their guns were drawn. My neighbors complained to the landlord, and I almost got evicted just because the cops were there, freaking out the neighbors.

Another friend of mine had a party at his girlfriend's place. A few random troublemakers showed up, started a fight, and broke the girl's door. The cops had to be called in to make sure the people didn't come back. The owner found out about this, and my friend's girlfriend was evicted a month later.

If you are renting in a somewhat decent building and the management finds out about cops being called in to your place, you are probably going to get the boot, ESPECIALLY if you are on a month to month lease, which I believe the justin.tv people are.

This may not be "right" but one side effect of justin.tv is that this is all on video, so if laws or codes are actually broken and someone doesn't like it, they can just dig up the video to argue their case...

(how do I know there were underage drinkers on justin.tv? my girlfriend is 20 and showed me the footage of herself and her friends drinking out by the pool and in the hallway.)
Impressive. =)

I bet most people assume it's getting a lot less traffic than that. Perhaps it's the font, or the community? It just "seems" small, even though it's clearly not.
Picking a brand new domain does usually seem to be the best bet.

Net marketing guru John Reese has a tale of how he sold his first domain for $1,000. After the paperwork was signed, the domain broker let him in on a secret. He was actually buying the domain on behalf of a VC firm for $1 million. =)

The trick would be (if it still works) to always use a no-name broker or middleman to get the lowest price... but I'm no expert either.
"This is a BUG, not a feature."

That's the way BitTorrent is supposed to work, by definition. If it didn't, the client would soon be banned for leeching.

If you don't want this to happen, don't run BitTorrent.

Calling this a "bug" is like complaining that your email program sends mail, or that your web browser downloads web pages.

"I had no idea that firefox extensions could spawn processes."

A Firefox extension can do just about anything that any other program can do. It can contain arbitrary C++ XPCOM components. Be careful out there.
Is it that easy to evict people in the US? I thought the US had strict laws to protect tenants?
I, for one, welcome our new geek humor overlords.
When I think of a data warehouse, I think of a huuuuuge database to rule all databases. This sounds more just like one big database.

(I used to be a mini-DBA at SBC, which reportedly had the 2nd largest commercial data warehouse in the world. Wal-Mart is #1.)
India's Skills Famine
Are you sure you didn't pay for that off of ReviewMe.com? j/k

That's a great writeup! Weebly is pimp.
Yes, to work 80 I'd better damn near have a crapload of equity.

OR, it's gotta be a YouTube, Facebook, or some other really hot startup with tons of growth and potential. (not another also ran like a good chunk of Web 2.0 startups are becoming... sadly)
25,000 page views on an average is impressive. It also proved wrong some of the prediction that after the competition, the traffic will drop down. The articles and stuffs in here are so good that its better to read it in than to visit multiple sites :)
Ok, now respond to the first paragraph. (Reddit is harder than you think to write, but did I say anything about it in the comment you're replying to?)
Yup, there's nothing else out there with such a high quality of start-up relevant content. I use news.yc every day, even thought I have no intention of using YC for my start-up.
Really great response.

I had often lumped SmugMug and 37Signals into the same category, but I have to say that after the past few months I've come to see them in a different light.

37Signals while brilliant in much of what they do, has seemed to acquire the curse of hubris and it's embarrassing to see. Some of their recent responses to criticism in particular seem quite petty, abrasive, and defensive.

SmugMug on the other hand seems much more mature and even self-deprecating in their approach. After meeting Don McAskill it's easy to see why - he is one of the smartest and nicest guys I've ever met. He hosted a geek lunch recently and I was really impressed with him and how genuine he is.

Anyway, it's really great that there are some good examples to follow in our little startup world.
With a month-to-month lease, the landlord can ask the tenant to leave for any reason (other than discrimination) provided they give the tenant 30 days notice.
Most failures and successes are based on the business' operations....too much marketing/sales will drive a start-up to failure. Too much work setting up operations causes the business to really never start. My advice to my clients is if you are not a person who can balance both sides of business you need to get another person to take on the part you are not strong at...most of the time it is Operations....

Scot Duke
Virtual Operations Consulting
http://innovativebusinessgolf.com
you must hate what you do...
It's been a few years since I was a sysadmin, but I believe either his DNS system or qmail system will show it. When I first read them, I thought they were very annoying, because it's not one monolithic program, and there are a lot of one-line shell scripts that do sequential operations using exec.
The way he describes it, he's getting rid of a lot of parsing by using the directory tree instead of text files following. But this use of directories can also be good for some of the more degenerate uses of databases.
Mostly I recall the "aha" moment of "So, this is the Unix philosophy in action." The design is very elegant.
Would you have passed him by? and could you recognize any of the pieces?

I remember when my wife and I visited Paris on a package deal vacation a few years ago, we were enthralled by the musicians in the subway. They were ordinary musicians, but we loved their music. We did not tip more than a euro or two.
But listened and chatted with them, took their photos, and could not understand why everybody simply ignored them as pests.

One time it was a poor man playing the trombone skillfully, another time it was a woman violinist (a student), another time a poor man on an accordion.

About as many people passed by and everyone behaved, in fact, worse than the article. No one stopped to listen, nobody even tipped one euro.

So you see, it was not simply ignorant, right-wing Washington DC, but in one of the fasionable, snooty art capitals of the world that this happened.
S3 is one of the greatest things ever: turn capex into an operating expense. My dream is a world of only variable expenses and the cost of starting a company drops to almost $0...
How much more traffic do you need before the venture capitalists start showing interest?
Summer YCombinator teams take note: Mass is also a right-to-rent state. If you don't have a formal, set-term lease (a verbal contract, month-to-month, or expired lease) both the tenant and landlord can call it quits with a 30 day notice with no reason required. Very handy if you ask me. If you want a formal lease you can find one but if you and the landlord are OK with a looser arrangement that is OK too.
WorkHack redefines 'Simple' Task Management
Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen: Rule of thumb: Is 1-9-90 really correct?
YUI Version 2.2.0 Released
'... We don`t make it as easy to get your photos AND metadata back out of SmugMug ...'

This one sucks in my view. But I dont think it matters as much as it does with flickr which seems to attract a geekier crowd. Instead of beating themselves up over something that doesn't matter to users they concentrate on more useful things like openid ~ http://blogs.smugmug.com/release-notes/2007/02/23/new-features-february-23rd-2007/