skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can replace the whole system, yes. It's most of the case for early statups where you have only a few developers communicating intimately.

When you write components used by multiple groups, things get far more complicated; you have to provide some stubs so that other party's old code keeps working until they finish migration. Here, at least doing protocol right is essential. (Web app has advantage here, since you can just ride on existing protocols.)
But, I thought, worse was better? I'm so confused... =)
Wil Schroter - http://www.gobignetwork.com/wil/
No BS and to the point.
I'd add o'reilly radar. Some interesting tech posts there every week or so.

Creating Passionate Users used to be a favourite but alas the writer has been the target of a vicious stalker and stopped writing.
I think the "liked it"/"hated it" options are basically enough all the time, at least in aggregate. RottenTomatoes.com seems to end up with good ratings despite reducing the answer space to green or red tomatoes.
I like 37 signals blog ( http://www.37signals.com/svn/ ). They do promote themselves, but they also have a lot of good insights. Apart from that, I main read what is linked to from dzone.com, programming.reddit.com, or occasionally digg, although not a big fan of digg.
There are so many "X Things You MUST Do . . ." and "Y Things NEVER To Do . . ." articles that after having read a substantial number of them I wonder what a presentation based on the sum of all of their advice would look like.
"In the next 30 minutes you will receive 20 pieces of information clearly demonstrating the eight signs of a successful startup, while avoiding the five pitfalls and accentuating the. . ."
Plus Google is probably the most hacker-compatible of all big cos.

Maybe N years ago when google was a little startup. In every big company there is the rule that you need to do a specific stuff, and this is the worst thing that an hacker can suffer, at least in my experience: all the hackers I know tend to switch domain every few months, just the time to understand "how it works".
I suggest you re-read the OP.

And it's a pretty ironic thing in a start-up community to say "we don't value cleverness"!
Beyond the obvious, revenue has an interesting role in cash flow
Imagine an article supporting the opposite "Release Early" is more important than "Do it right". Clearly you could find examples to support either view. YC obviously has a comprehensive startup strategy that includes defaults for many standard behaviors that when combined result in success. Examining some of the downfalls of one of these behaviors out of context with the rest may lead to poor conclusions.
the team wanted to let people track how much a document had changed over time. They pored over Ph.D. theses and complex algorithms. Instead, ace programmer David Hansson worked out a "cheat": software to track the number of characters in each document. ... With that clever solution, 37signals reduced what could have been a months-long programming project to a day's work

full implementation:

counter++

Keyword: "Ace"
I think it really depends on your goals. If you are planning on working for someone else, I would say go with either PHP, Ruby, or Python. Those seem to have the most opportunities. If you plan on creating your own app, then perhaps it would be wise to look into the less common but perhaps more powerful languages like Smalltalk (for Seaside) or Common Lisp.
The deal would be in stock, not cash, and so is more a reflection of the value of MySpace to Yahoo, not the value of MySpace to everyone using the dollar as a standard. If MySpace is lined up to be trounced by Facebook, then I would imagine that Yahoo has some reason to be concerned as well (their problems are showing more and more through the seams). Remember when Google bought YouTube and within a couple of days the increase in Google stock price paid for the acquisition cost? Perhaps MySpace is indeed this valuable to Yahoo.
5 Tips to Take Your Business from Idea to Reality
I wonder if a site like this would encourage people to structure their predictions with qualifiers and clauses in such a way as to give them the maximum chance of being proven "correct". Also, I wonder if this site would encourage people to make their 'prediction' be more about explaining their beliefs about the present rather than guessing at data/outcomes that will occur in the future.
No-one has a clue how consumers will behave.
I am not sure your thesis actually holds. Can you name any fat and ugly women with brilliant ideas that have been dismissed because of their looks?

And I think men are being judged based on looks, too.
I think no matter how much planning you put into it, you will always make mistakes. Mabye if you release early, you can also discover the mistakes sooner.

And the cryptography stuff was a bad example, I think. Seems to me with proper "design", the public keys algorithm would be a pluggable detail (I mean the actual mathematical algorithm, not the implementation of the whole cryptography system).
menubar app + s3 + ftp + itunes + backup = Bandwagon
To YCNews readers: free 3-month account

Use coupon code: ycnbw
Enter here: http://buy.ridethebandwagon.com/

Requires Mac OS 10.4 + iTunes 7+ and spotlight enabled

Would love thoughts/feedback.
"Start small. Many people are afraid to make phone calls, or to approach a clerk in a store. Begin by practicing these little habits. A clerk in a book store answers hundreds of questions a month. Theres no reason to be frightened of asking yours."

I used to be afraid of stuff like this. Then I started hanging out with new people, some of whom are even worse than I was. It's really helped. I ask them why they don't just do something. They confess that they're afraid. I ridicule them, knowing that I would also be too afraid in their place. Then I have to do it myself to demonstrate that it's not hard or scary at all.

Unfortunately I haven't yet applied the general rule.
Mankiw also wrote an excellent economics textbook (actually a series - http://www.thomsonedu.com/economics/mankiw/index.html) for those who want a more in-depth perspective than he provides on his blog.
Yes for sure, we know we still have to do some distance and monetary conversions for outside the US. We will get there!
what was rejected?
Idea Volcano - Blog for sharing/discussing business ideas
my take is to first know how I will behave, will I use it? Purchase it, recommend it? It was probably best that BVP past on Apple, eBay, FedEx opportunities. Sounds like they were unable to use those products, --it's more than just the financial investment, it's the viral leverage as well.
Really good point about redefining the pitch and returning based on what they critiqued.
Web 2.0 Media: Digg For SEO Only!
I don't like being harsh, but it seems to me that most of the websites and blogs about ideas are started precisely by people who couldn't find any better idea.
Us rejects.
writing a lot of code allows many experiments to be performed.

this is valuable when the problem is not well-defined, or when solutions can't be evaluated until tested on actual users or under partly-unknown real-world conditions.

otherwise he's right, a problem should be studied carefully before any coding, for best efficiency
I think the way to do this functionally is the Haskell way with Monads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monads_in_functional_programming

Having used Haskell (which is purely functional) to write a compiler for a CS class, state is mostly kept by passing it around and using recursion. It's hard to explain if you don't know Haskell, however the other way is to use Monads. I can't explain them, because I don't understand them completly myself. Anyhoo, good luck.
Zenter: How a six-month-old startup got bought by Google
Have you tried RadRails? I think it was easy for me due to familiarity with eclipse.
Congrats to both sites, although I rarely visit Digg anymore and am addicted to Facebook. Honestly, I'd rather have the market that Facebook has, rather than the Digg market. I believe because of it's start, Facebook has a solid hold on the college age market, while digg has a nice footing in the geek area.
Build something cool. Throw it up online; see if it catches on.

The best gigs I ever landed were obtained without the use of a resume. Simply an email + a link to a cool site that I've built.
Search is a Hard Problem
If you work alone you can never be sure you don't fall foul of the Dunning-Kruger effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect :-) (This was on reddit today which is how I know about it!)

Seriously though. I basically code alone for 8 hours a day but I bounce my ideas of off anyone that will listen and I freely give up half my coding time to do this when the opportunity is there. There is nothing like a second opinion.
If he is a coder, how is it harder to judge the "talented" aspect of the equation?

People/soft skills are very important, but what % are they relative to coding quality/output/volume?

I've telecommuted for almost a year before, working for a startup.

Communication can be a pain and you have to be really careful about wording, etc. when you're using email / IM / etc. Without vocal inflection it's easy to mistake joking / sarcasm / bluntness as instead someone just being a total dick.
s/cleverness/jokiness

and I read the OP.
hell yeah she is!
Looks interesting, but at what stage in the game do you need this sort of thing?
I am very interested in what Zenter built
I feel the crux of the matter is: is a bug costly and/or an embarassment?
Powerset (natural language based search engine) to launch front-end on ruby
Patents are evil ... but head-starts are good
An Overview of the Scala Programming Language [pdf] (why use Ruby for your startup when you can use Scala?)
Search engines leaking oil for holes (Marti Hearst on search & 'garden path sentence' deception in sentences )
Also see:

http://blog.lostlake.org/index.php?/archives/45-A-real-world-use-of-lift.html#extended
YouTube on the iPhone Proof (video)
Developing a product in less than two weeks
The OP was noise. That's the point of my original response.
For start ups, I would much rather see someone with a track record with finished projects. Programs, code, apps, open source contributions, references from people you've worked with are all the things I look for as far as skills.

A blog is nice, because in an interview process, I only really get to know you for like 1 hour tops. In a blog, I can better understand your values, your interests, and what you've done.

Resumes have their place, if you have hundreds of potential candidates to go through. If you are a good candidate, you should have pages and pages worth of experiences, and it's now a matter of picking the experiences relevant to the task.
'... Mac OS 10.4 + iTunes 7+ and spotlight enabled ...'

no mac but do you have screencaps & text or vid demo?
I don't equate men in the field of computing as cutey pies because I don't find men cute.

How does thinking someone is cute make her accomplishments not equal to men?

To me your looks and your accomplishments are completely independent. Your accomplishments stand on their own, regardless of how you look.

I think you are overreacting somewhat.
For that matter, there are a dozens of other languages other than Ruby that would work just as well. Ruby just happens to have a decent framework for it, that happens to be well known.

Here is a link to wikipedia if you don't want to read the whole PDF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scala_%28programming_language%29
'... apparently, when Udi was demoing this for Larry Page, he asked why the images weren't translating. Obviously, there is still work to be done, but it is quite amazing ...'

That's got to be a joke. Aside from being time consuming, not scaling well it's beyond even googles core skillset(s).
"Stick to your knitting," says Paul Graham, a founding partner of Y Combinator, the startup factory that funded Zenter. "The way to get acquired really fast is to not focus on it. If people get the impression that you want to get bought, you won't."

What the hell other impression would people get from someone who applies to YC and then goes to Demo Day?
Here are screenshots...

http://ridethebandwagon.com/home.html#product-description
Unlike Ruby, Scala is statically typed. However, due to local type inference, you can often omit variable type declarations.

Scala has the Lift Web Framework:

http://liftweb.net
Marc Andreessen: So you think you want to invest in a private equity fund
SuperNova Conference StartUps: Spot the fake startup!
Internet radio to go silent on June 26?
wanting investment perhaps?
Getting bought is the #1 exit strategy. Even Viaweb got bought. Hardly anyone is going public these days, so that means investors want you to get bought.

"Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. [...] Now the default exit strategy is to get bought" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html

"Bought? Who, us? No way!" isn't going to fool anyone.

"Younger would-be founders are often surprised that investors expect them either to sell the company or go public. The reason is that investors need to get their capital back. They'll only consider companies that have an exit strategy-- meaning companies that could get bought or go public." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html
Release as early as you can get away with and attract users.

As more and more people release software, it becomes harder and harder to attract users. The bar on the first release is going up.
Sorry, too many levels of meta for me.
It is ok to not write code for a while, if that works for you. But inactivity can easily breed paralysis, a form of fear of the blank page. And that paralyzing fear of the blank page is far likelier if you're afraid of embarrassment, of forgetting some side issue that will make you look like an amateur (like the reddit guys did). But like in their case, embarrassment is often irrelevant.

Vision is important, yes. Necessary, definitely. But there are subtle feedback loops between vision and action. Just standing in one place is often not the best way to exploit vision. Moving a few steps here and there aids depth perception, and helps vision work better. A lot of the problem in a startup is not technical, a problem to crank through with a single correct answer. The major problem is understanding what users want, the details of interface in the technical area you have chosen. The fastest way to figure that out often passes through a couple of troughs of some criticism and embarrassment.

I think this is a good conversation to have, because it helps us latecomers to unpack the wisdom in 'release early, release often.'

---

There's a subtle fallacy in juxtaposing the phrases 'do it right' and 'release early, release often'. 'Do it right' is a cipher: impossible to use, impossible to criticize. Of course I want to do it right. Who wouldn't? But how should I?

'Release early, release often' gives me advice on how to go about doing it right. We can argue about the value of that advice, but it is inarguably proactive. It takes a stand.
Same here glad to see some people who share a common loneliness in their startups.
Add digital content into books (Manolis Kelaidis: future of books as an interface to digital content)
I rely on news.yc for most of this type of thing, but I check out http://www.venturehacks.com/ on occasion.
Stock photo search engine review (images for free & royalty-free)
Pure Coolness (describes paper e-book device that Manolis Kelaidis prototyped)
"If people get the impression that you want to get bought, you won't."

"If 98% of the time success means getting bought, why not be open about it? If 98% of the time you're doing product development on spec for some big company, why not think of that as your task?" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Maybe you should be open amongst your team but coy with outsiders?
First principle of social web apps and its implications
Definitely read the "Design for Exit" section of http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
I'm not sure what to make of all the "we are going to be high traffic stuff". A bunch of hype probably inspires you to deliver a little more, but beyond that it seems pretty risky. I for one am more apt to look for flaws if you've hyped yourself too much where I would have been inclined to look for strengths otherwise.
I think pg means be open to yourself.

Everything you want in life you have to play hard to get otherwise you wont get it or at least will get a rubbish valuation if you do, that's just obvious.
Question for Paul Graham: What philosophy books do you recommend?
Hmm. I sorta see your point, but I think it's a little more nuanced than that. There's a continuum. I'm guessing he means the bulk of your time should be spent building a good product as opposed to aggressively courting acquirers. If your main focus is on your product then a Demo Day here and there is just good business.
I've read most of Paul Graham's essay's and have read that he was a philosophy/classics major, so I wonder what sorts of books influenced him. I'd like to read a few of the old books too, but I don't know where to start.

Here is a constraint for the recommendations:
-At least one book that is good to start with and not too challenging
Good cite.

"If 98% of the time success means getting bought, why not be open about it? If 98% of the time you're doing product development on spec for some big company, why not think of that as your task?" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Edit: I quoted that when I checked my threads, before I saw you excerpted the same thing as a top-level post elsewhere.
My impression is that everyone wants to get bought. Even Google tried to get bought first.

It's quite possible PG was misquoted -- news reports do that all the time. I'm not going to try to guess what he "really" meant in this article when his own website essays say something different.
I like Scala, and I think Lift is very promising, but to answer the rhetorical question, I'd use Ruby because Rails is at a more mature stage in its lifetime than Lift is (I think Lift list just had its 0.2 release). There are some very promising numbers, and developing with Lift is certainly doable (although tutorials and docs are relatively scarce compared to other frameworks), but this may be a good time to harken back to PG's comments about technology firms who bet on the success of Java Applets (I mean, it kind of feels like Lift is a one man production, which means you're relying heavily upon someone who doesn't even know who you are...).

Scala is fantastic though, don't think I'm disagreeing.
Playing hard-to-get can also mean you don't get it.
Yep, and I think Spock is finding this now. Powerset had better launch something really cool.
There's a big difference between "maybe we'll sell eventually" and "we're looking to flip this thing right now". It's important to avoid _having_ to sell.
"Flip" means to get rid of it. To the contrary, founders may well be in a hurry to scale UP, which you certainly can do when acquired by the right company, like Google (as you know).

And "maybe we'll sell"? Who are "they" kidding?
I don't know how if you've existed for only a few months and are in acquisition talks you aren't going to give the impression that you want to get bought.
It's easy to find yourself justifying bad decisions that were made for the wrong reasons. A good partner can be a great reality check, in a way no one else could. This is probably the biggest single advantage for me because I can be dangerously stubborn on occasion.
Actually the startups we've funded have a whole range of ambitions. Some would sell early if they could; others are bent on world domination (like Loopt).

I don't know why everyone seems to think we encourage founders to sell early. Like all venture investors, we make more money if founders don't sell early, and instead keep trying to grow the company. We can afford more risk than founders can. The difference between us and most other venture investors is that we don't forbid founders to sell early, if they really want to. But surely you can see that it would be more in our interest if they all tried to be the next Google?
No, what investors want is for you to go public. Next best would be the sort of huge acquisition where the price is increased by the threat of an IPO. Third best is a medium-scale (e.g. Viaweb) acquisition. Getting bought early is the least attractive option to investors except going out of business.
I was really hoping this was going to say "launched" instead of "to launch"
PicoChip closes largest financial round, enables Software Defined Radio
Off the top of my head I can't think of any I'd recommend. What I learned from trying to study philosophy is that the place to look is in other fields. I.e. if you understand math or history or aeronautical engineering very well, the most abstract of the things you know are what philosophy is supposed to be teaching. Books on philosophy per se are either highly technical stuff that doesn't matter much, or vague concatenations of abstractions their own authors didn't fully understand (e.g. Hegel).

It can be interesting to study ancient philosophy, but more as a kind of accident report than to teach you anything useful.

BTW, while this was an interesting question, it's not really about startups, so I'm killing it.
'... A bunch of hype probably inspires you to deliver a little more, but beyond that it seems pretty risky ...'

Maybe they don't want to release because they know how much more they have to work on it. So far the biggest thing I don't see yet is a feedback mechanism ie: usage. Do they do have a beta program that someone has signed up & used?

Spock could also learn from this. My favourite feature in spock is "add an acquaintance" If you select a name (any name because there is bound to be others with the same name) and they don't have a photo, your forced to add by name alone. 9/10 times it's the wrong one. I've given up for the moment. This would have been picked up in a simple 5 minute test by a novice user to add people you know.

I wonder if powerset will make the similiar mistakes?
If you use this you may want to install the current version of Ruby (1.8.6) first.
www.valleywag.com

don't scoff, this is the nicest of the gossip that I hear going around. Haven't you ever been in a group of good-old-boys (of any age) at a bar?
"... One entrepreneur won over by the Founders Fund's philosophy is Barney Pell, the 38-year-old founder of Powerset, a natural-language search-engine startup that harbors ambitions of challenging Google ..."

I wonder how well 'Clarium Capital Management' are advising their funded companies. Powerset is really setting themselves up for a fall if their search results are a magnitude worse than google. They have made some mistakes that I can think of so far:

- they are 'talking' about their instead of 'showing' their product

- talking about technology (nlp) instead of about how it makes search easier, better for users

- licensing their 'core' technology from PARC, Xerox & not investing in their own ~ http://www.powerset.com/press/parc

"... Parker came up with a novel arrangement that he hopes will benefit other founders as they build their companies: a new type of stock that allows 'founders to cash out a small percentage of their stake in a funding round so they don't have to wait until the company is sold or goes public' . ..."

But they are getting some things right (percentage of cash up front)
And I was doubling down his irony with my second comment.
Way beyond interesting. Thanks for responding to his off-topic question. I wanted to ask the same one, but managed restraint. "Ask Paul" would be an awesome section and probably serve as a great FAQ. I suppose it'd be annoying for you though.
This is the altruistic part of YC that will be very hard for the YC clones to copy well. Most investors will get greedy and push their investments to boom or bust.
Instead of launching, Powerset has decided to simply push the earth downward from their relative position.