skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everything is based on majority vote. With over 50,000 voting members there is enough critical mass that it would be hard to sway the results for political reasons.
That might work, if you limit each person to one share of the team (there might be other rules needed, too).

Where it would break down is if a handful of people owned most of the shares, leading to factional in-fighting.

Most of the leagues (like the NFL in the Jets case), though, don't like this kind of ownership structure.

Do you think this group, if it can raise the cash, would be approved?
I'm actually a member of the group. Each person has only one vote. The group has already been through all the legal entities in England and has been approached by 4 teams that are interested in the investment.
Well, good luck with it.

If you're successful, I'll hit you up for luxury suite tickets when I'm in the UK ;)
Bigger than YouTube? ;-)
Startup Infrastructure and Speed
Every time I get a new company going, it gets easier and easier to focus on the new mission and lay the infrastructure off on someone else. It's always nerve-wracking to rely on others for mission-critical functionality, but fixing other people's problems is a lot quicker than doing everything yourself.
The 100 Daily Must-Reads for Entrepreneurs (By Category)
Missing some important ones, but being broken down by category makes it semi-appealing...
Disney pays $350M for children's site plus more if growth goals are met
I like the note about privacy. I believe it -- we need to push for a transparent society. Certain activities will always be easy to do anonymously, but certain capabilities are just founded on identity persistence. I'm curious if there could be a framework that has great persistence of preferences and identity, and maintains anonymity.

Another note: it's all just software. That makes it easier to acheive if you integrate systems. It also limits reach. You still need to move your ass from point A to B to C. Most of the time, you'll need to pay attention while doing it -- automated driving isn't part of web 4.0.

Also, there is a ton of legwork involved in services. Many services demand people behind them. It would be nice if humans were only needed to thing -- to have and share desires/preferences/thoughts. Right now, only a minority of people have the luxury to do that full-time.
Expect to see 300 million dollars worth of penguin banner ads in the second half of next year.
people who hate spending money for shitty products

Uh, no. Unless you consider 95 percent (or whatever) of all the movies and music and software ever made as consistently "shitty".

Or they hate paying an inflated price.

Look up "beethoven symphonies" on piratebay, and you'll see plenty of people seeding and leeching. Then look up the same on amazon, and you'll see that all 9 are available together as low as 20 dollars. If 20 dollars is an "inflated price" for that product, well, then there's no point in trying...

Piracy is competition and should be treated as such

Compete with zero? Sigh. Blah-dee, blah-dee, blah.
Eloquent JavaScript - An interactive online book about programming
Hardware is, err, hard.
Scaling to the masses means reliability engineering and thoughts given to logistics, manufacturing, etc.

Getting a version 1 out the door can be extremely expensive. Perhaps the revolution in China is changing this, making it much easier to build things in 10s and 100s.

And any interesting product will also have software. This makes it a superset of software startups.
Flip Side of Entrepreneurship: Hard Work
I thought to myself, what the heck was I doing wasting my time in the lab while James Hong and Markus Friend are working 2 hours a day in their underwears? Why don't I just start a company myself?
Thanks for the comments and feedback everyone! We've had a few rough patches over the past 12 hours, but we're up and running again (special thanks to the Dropbox team for their help). As a random aside, it turns out we're getting far more traffic from del.icio.us than TC right now.
I like how they list 8 productivity blogs. Anyone who is subscribed to 8 productivity blogs is probably not taking the advice.
You might be interested in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ by Pirsig. I believe it's the source of the quotation. It's a philosophical book about "quality"-- that which makes some things "better" than others. Beware it's a rather tough read; I started it three times before realizing it wasn't a book I could read before bed but rather one I needed to read just after waking up.
Songs are being uploaded by the second already. Looks like a winner!
I agree, when I purchase something I look at what other people have complained about. If enough people complain about a particular problem, then I'll evaluate if I think it would bother me.
nope. but bug labs is..
http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2006/05/introducing_bug.h...
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/07/30/bugLabsInitialRe...
Yahoo!'s bet on Hadoop
The science and art of marketing
This Is Your Brain On Wi-Fi...
Thanks for all your valuable feedback and comments, it is really motivating :).

Now some advice I wish I followed... sleep a LONG time the day before you launch ;).
"Buxfer may terminate your access to the Website or your membership at any time, for any reason, and without warning, which may result in the forfeiture and destruction of all information associated with your membership."

Ouch.

Legalese aside, this new deal with Amazon means you guys are currently a free alternative to Western Union and will soon be a cheaper alternative to the same, right?
You're right. However, I'm not sure Great Gatsby types really reap huge benefits from having libraries.
I would imagine that anyone who has the time to read 100 blogs daily isn't really cut out to be much of an entrepreneur.
More like an alternative to neteller/firepay.
Important marketing safety tip: Never compare the language you're trying to advocate to Cobol.

"Our language may be dead, but its ghost will haunt you forever" is not a good slogan, even if it is true.
There is something fishy about this site. Businesscreditcards.com? And all the pages seem to be lists. Presumably it is an SEO guy who has realized that with comparatively little effort (e.g. by combining delicious tags with feed subscriber numbers) you can compile lists of the most popular sites on some topic.
This wisdom of the crowd's stuff shouldn't be taken so far.

Democracy works in two ways:

1. It eliminates the extreme options.
2. It's designed to ensure representation, not perfomance.

When you look at things that have been designed by committee, you're looking - at best - at mediocrity. This is a good thing when you don't want government performing too well in the wrong direction, but it's a hindrance if you are trying to establish peak performance.

Sports teams are looking for peak performance. The best way to achieve this is to install a knowledgeable dictator. The risk is that the dictator will make the wrong calls. It's a lot like business. Which is why public companies never innovate.

So, even if this flies, the team will be mired in being average. Never winning, never losing. Success would be solely dependent on the oddity of a year that the mediocre prevail.

To me, that defeats the whole purpose for having a team in the first place.
That is cool. Waiting for Demo Day
No particular reasons. I just think there is a huge opportunity is the field and they usually require more capital. And I want to see someone go against the titans of hardware.
The point he's making is that the process of aggregating still takes alot of time. The guy simply wants to live his life and spend less time in front of the computer. In that regard this new wave of Web 2.0 is not solving anyone's problems. Online reviews have been around forever, he is aking us to build something new, better, something more useful, in a sense that it won't take you a day of research to buy a new camera, for instance.

Speaking of reviews, I also agree with him that "wisdom of crowds" is overrated. Movie reviews are an excellent example: crowds generally have no freakin taste. Similarly, crowds do not know jack in photography, computers or politics. Dig deep and long enough and you will always disagree with the crowds.

In fact, when someone is unable to conduct his own judgement, asking for the opinion of others is the easiest thing to do,

In that regard Web is 100% focused on helping you with the easiest thing. "Not that helpful" he argues, and I agree.
The Best Products Designs of 2007
The job title of the future for marketing departments is Video Producer
Since Windows is the only OS model that is measured in multiples of all the other models, that is to say "Windows has 10 times the users of Unix, or 1,000x the user base of the Mac OS, I think you could say that Windows, is a viable long term OS model. You think that we really didn't need a desktop? You must be a communist. Oh and I'll agree with you on WMD's in Iraq, but please don't bring Madonna into this.
This is an especially poignant post for me today. My company just closed it's first customer via YouTube. The sale closed in less than 24 hours. Considering we sell high-end scanning products our sales cycle is normally much, much longer. A quick demo video cut through the noise. We don't expect that to be the norm, but for customers with red-hot pain, it provides all the information they need to feel confident stroking a check.
Huh. I found two new essays:

http://paulgraham.com/mistakes.html

http://store.yahoo.com/secrets.html
I wish they would stop trying to make me watch slideshows. Just give me everything on a web page.
My startup idea: ClipArena.com - I made it in one week. What do you think?
Good point. If Bill Gates subscribes, he alone adds about $33k to the average net worth of their 1.7 million print subscribers.
Lamenting the Loss of Reddit
Perhaps it is true that profitability and quality content correlate inversely?
Three years later, Flickr gets around to video
A Guide to Micro Seed Funding (by Dan Veltri, Weebly)
Brains Trump Money for Startups
The balance of power is shifting from investors to hackers when it comes to starting a software company.

Why? "Because you don't need as much money, but you still need as much brains," says Paul Graham. He's a co-founder of Y Combinator, which provides micro-funding (along with reams of good advice and great contacts) to entrepreneurs.
Right. A web page with a scrollbar is the best format for a "slideshow" when it comes to giving control to the user. That's how you view groups of photos on ourdoings.com. Autoplay slideshows have uses, but they shouldn't be the default way to view a group of photos.
I very much doubt a census was taken. The page says the source is from a "2007 WSJ Subscriber Study." It is very doubtful Bill Gates was part of this study. In all likelihood, they polled a relatively small random sample and the median was pretty close to the average.
Amazon FPS + Buxfer = Crazy Delicious ??
Spatial data warehousing in PostgreSQL
In the very near future I will need to create a data warehouse for storing a rather large amount of data. I'm not sure what it will be in terabytes, but let's just say that it won't be huge instantly, but it will be big instantly, and need to scale to support whatever new data sets (dimensions) get thrown its way.

The language will be Python (Django), but I'm waffling on the database. All of my experience is with MySQL, but I believe the out-of-the-box support for some of the software we'll be using is PostgreSQL.

Do any of you have experience with data warehousing? What about a data warehouse with spatial features? And what of the trade-offs between MySQL and PostgreSQL for this task?

Any information/links you can provide on any of these subjects would be fantastic.
I thought this would be of interest to people considering applying to Y Combinator or the other micro seed funding programs - but YC's clearly best. I had to write this for school in order to graduate (on Monday!) so I figured I'd do it on something relevant.

- Dan
English 202?
Listen, I agree with you in spirit, but it's not practical. Here's what I have no problem with:

Let's say foo is 15 and he wants to download Super Expensive Program 9000. He spends all day looking for a torrent. Then, once he's downloaded it, the next day it takes him another full day to figure out how to install it and get the various cracks working and everything configured.

Right, that's fine. Here's the problem:

Time passes, foo's grown up. He's 25, and a software engineer, making $75k a year. He goes to thepiratebay.org and finds Super Expensive Program 9000 immediately. He downloads it in about an hour. It installs immediately with no requirement to apply a crack or any other technical detail. It just installs and works.

Okay, I have a problem with the second one, because once piracy becomes a one-click solution it starts to hurt those that make the program. The first isn't a problem because 15 year olds don't buy programs anyway, but they might buy it when they grow up (Like I did with Visual Assist).

If there's a way to make it artificially hard to get something for free, I say let them get it, because only the committed will be able to. If it's easy (Napster, ThePirateBay, etc) it needs to be made harder.

Also, making money by giving away people's work for free in a one-click solution is just evil. If you're going to give it away for free, make it hard, and don't make any money from it.
Slightly OT, but did you present at the NYC Tech Meetup last year?
Yes! Do they have ex post facto laws?
I'm doing a plain old piece of software for a start up. You know, the kind you install onto your machine and it integrates nicely with the operating system. Yea, I miss those days too. Sorry, I want to do hardware in the future though.
Haha, yeah, Dave and I were there presenting a very early Weebly. This was prior to YC, but things sure have changed a lot since. Did we meet?
The Loss of Reddit
You know, after watching Ron Conway's interview where he talks about this in a nuanced way:

http://www.podtech.net/home/3632/calacaniscast-beta-30

I understand his perspective better and I agree that it's at least an uncomfortable development. I still think that shareholders have every right to look after their stake and investment, though.
Paul Graham: The 10 Secrets of Selling Online (1997)
Paul Graham: 10 E-Commerce Mistakes (1997)
Briefly, but I wasn't sure if it was you (I'd forgotten your company's name).

Anyway, it's good to see you still going; a lot of startups present there, and you never hear about them again.
Eight Financial Reasons Why You Should Use Mac OS X
Honestly, it looks GREAT! and it works great! I love the concept.
Kind of HotOrNot+Video mashup. Sweet.

[get rid of that "sexy " stuff. Look at dailymotion.com .Now they are working hard to get rid of the porn content.Reason, they didnt care about it in the beginning ]
Ok, those were some interesting ideas, but please don't version the web.
Sounds like an interesting idea -
Whats the user base of Buxfer at the moment ?
Crowds vs. Herds
I read Dharmesh Shah's "Lamenting the Loss of Reddit" at onstartups.com, which furter fueled a notion that's been brewing for some time now.

When does the Wisdom of Crowds become Herd Mentality? And why? The easy answer is that with wider adoption it's inevitable. Early adopters are, I would propose, more interesting people, generally, than later waves of mass market users.

If you're a social media startup is it an unconscious goal to make your community boring? Are Paris Hilton threads a sign of success?

This is only a thought stub, put out quickly. I'm interested to know what others think about this.
the slideshow is the devil's format. agreed.
If that's true it would be awesome, unfortunately it's not.
humans needed to think, not thing. I should try it more :-P
Looks gorgeous. Where's the business model? You can't have a business without a way for it to make money.
Great Site, can't wait to read it all.
To wear hats.
Mozilla Releases Hacker Tools
Its fantastic & very entertaining.

A true testament to what can be achieved with skill, knowledge, and an idea.

Well done.
We've re-enabled using the client uploaders to bulk-upload music.
A community is just a set of people and customs. Both aspects can evolve significantly in a short amount of time unless control is asserted in one way or another to prevent this possibility.

I don't think it is a sign of success or failure that communities have evolved, but just simply that they have evolved. I also don't think that every community wants to be boring eventually. In fact, many communities exert intense control so that this doesn't happen (barriers to entry for new members, moderation, etc.). It all depends on how it is set up, monitored, and controlled.

Finally, I also don't think that wide adoption necessitates being boring. Plenty of communities are heavily moderated/edited/whatever and still have a wide following. Extreme examples are newspapers, movies, and tv shows. Communities crop up around them, but most people have little control over what is published. This is interestingly slowly changing though with TV shows and newspapers. Comments on stories and online fan boards are starting to influence publishing, but it is still filtered in such a way that an attempt is made to keep it distinctly not boring.
Yay, dropbox. They're good guys.

PS: http://getdropbox.com
i think boring may have been the wrong word. i'm carving at the fact that communities seem to outgrow early adopters. which makes them more mainstream.
Unfortunately, your post was knocked off the top spot on TechCrunch pretty quickly with other stories. Congrats on the launch - this is a great product.
If you look at Surowiecki's requirement for a wise crowd (versus a herd), you'll see that he asserts the requirement of a few things (pulled straight from http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_crowds):

Diversity of opinion:
Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.

Independence:
People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.

Decentralization:
People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.

Aggregation:
Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

I would think that for most sites the first three would be the greatest challenges. The worst part is probably that what's most popular is getting greater exposure, thus making it more popular . . .
Well, they couldn't get mp3s from CDs until new technology made this possible. So if I had some technology which allowed me to get your source it would be okay for me to copy and use it, right?
Once and for all, What Entity and What State is best for incorporating
I have gotten so many different answers over the years. For a web startup, in what state is it best to incorporate and what type of corporate filing is best (C, S LLC, LLP).

I have heard Delaware and C Corp, but I wanted to know how YC does it.
How do the new internet radio fees effect you guys? If they nail you by claiming each person listening is listening to a unique radio station, the fees could become insane.

Not only that but a vast majority of people use pirated mp3's. If you guys explode in popularity the RIAA will absolutely come after you regardless of how great your service is. How are you going to deal with that?

It is not really a valid argument to claim that everything is legit because other companies are doing it.

I love the site and look forward to trying it out when I get home. Your UI is beautiful.
All you need is a regular audience of visitors and you can make money. Take PlentyOfFish.com for instance. Revenues of more then $5 million per year, all ad-driven.
100% agree with you. However, one can frequently assess the quality of any given review by the quality of the prose it is written in. This is especially true for Amazon, IMHO.
I like the idea a lot. I have no idea how you vote for a clip, though. You should make that dead obvious.
I think a better question would be: What parts of the hardware market are suited for startups, given the various capital needs and industry landscape. I'd actually be very interested to hear from people about that.
looks great guys!
You may have heard different answers because it really depends on the goals & circumstances of the startup. I have a few companies at the moment, and they each are set up differently.

Short answer. If you might eventually want outside investment or to go public or to have a lot of employees with stock options, you should be a corporation, though you can elect to be an S corp at first (as opposed to a C corp). If you never plan on doing any of this, you might want to be an LLC because it is easier to deal with. If you are only going to be in one state, it is easiest to just create the legal entity there.
There are big green "vote" buttons under each video. They disappear if you have voted, and result is shown.
Thank you for your feedback. Hmm.. there is a difference between "sexy" and "porn".. but, maybe you're right..
Well, one has to build the technology to maintain clusters of groups, not one big ball of people talking to each other at the same time. Sorry, I'm gonna sound like a broken record, but social groups are a hot topic, so: Read http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html :) it's a good read, you'll enjoy it. It perfectly captures all the issues between early adopters vs later adopters vs huge crowds.
Our lawyer recommended a Delaware S-corp, given that our idea is fairly pie-in-the-sky at the moment, and is setting us up as one.

One thing I didn't realize when researching these corp types: an S-corp converts to a C-corp automatically as soon as they take outside investment (outside investment = preferred shares. In theory, they can issue common and keep their S-election). There's no additional legal paperwork required, and no complicated reincorporation. That makes S-corps fairly attractive to businesses that might want to take outside investment if they take off, but have no idea if they're going to take off.
How woman entrepreneurs benefit from using a mentor
Thanks, dude.
I agree that the main page of reddit has become pretty lame. However, I think that subreddits are still a good place to visit: http://programming.reddit.com/ or http://joel.reddit.com/.

I think if they had more subreddits it would help but a lot of people do not seem to know about them. I've heard many people complain about the same issue that did not know the existence of these subreddits.
Nice layout. Easy to use. Good Luck!
"Crowd Farm": turn the mechanical energy of people walking into a source of electricity
Killer addition. A site where you can track expenses is cool, but if you can square them up with actual money, now we're really talking.

This would be very helpful for fantasy sports, where there's a lot of money flying around for site fees and prize pools. Fantasy football season is just around the corner and $100+ entry fees for workplace leagues are not that unusual.
Ka-Ching!
Ever since the first Amazon Web Service was released in mid-2002, we have encouraged developers to use them to create new types of businesses.
vuknje,
there is a typo on the url in your profile info. fyi.
Serial entrepreneurs-- who succeeds & why?
Great article for the summer -- all that hand-waving created a lovely breeze while I was reading it.