skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started skimming when they used hyphens for dashes.
In your two examples MS acknowledges the comparison
(1) they entered search late, with the wrong strategy. they admit it.
(2) Zune also entered late. but was an effort to get established in those markets.

Both examples do not comprehensively define MS, or future of core MS strategies, or of the future of MS including search and player strategies
Reading more closely into the related links and articles, the contest is a bit old...1999-2001. Iocaine Power finished 3rd later on, losing to its derivative, Greenberg. The year the article links to, you'll see that Josh from del.icio.us also entered his own bot in the contest, but didn't do nearly as well.

I wonder what the properties of the iterated roshambo is, and whether it applies to cooperation (or aggression in this case). I know that bittorrent uses Tit-for-tat for cooperation amongst its clients.
Why ask us? Ask an employment lawyer.
What you read guys to find a niche business :)
I think your point about MS inheriting status from IBM is key here. MS has always been primarily a business proposition. Bill, in presenting IBM a DOS he essentially bought off the shelf, posited the entire enterprise as 'a deal' to be struck.

What OSX and Linux both present is a vision, an ideal of how things should be. That ultimately is what is absent in Redmond.
I try to write in the third person as much as possible and avoid using personal pronouns. Although if you're writing a blog post, then I suppose you could use "I" or "we".
Is anyone using bots to make their social site look busy?  If so, how do the bots work?  Are users told that they may encounter bots?
this is the result of making simple things (un)done in the most complicated way :)
This is sad. I've always thought of cooking as an ordinary hacker passtime, like juggling or reading. Many of the coolest nerds I've hung out with are borderline foodies, though constrained by time and money, and nearly all are on the healthy side of Ayers's split.

If the article isn't misleading, I wonder what's going on. Are the YC guys just too busy? But they have time to shop (they just shop badly) and cooking catalyses productive conversations. Did they never learn to cook? But they must have parents, and the internet has a million recipes. Is there an obvious reason why food-oblivious people would end up at YC?
They ONLY CAN own anything they know about :)
justin.tv will go anything but bust.
Ok, I am not asking you :)
Is on-topic so I am asking others in the newsgroup who may know.
My current business partner went to the same highschool as I. He and I became friends because of our love of ideas. We both looked to the future not just as an amusing fiction, but as something we would create. So we were always working on science projects, rail guns, etc.

My initial interest in applying to Ycomb came when a friend of my brother's put an alert out to anyone who wanted to start a business on top of an idea he had around OpenID. I expressed interest and after he discarded his idea, he opted to join my project. However, the connection between he and I was far looser, and eventually he left the group. Interestingly, a day before our third left I told my brother that I had a feeling our third was going to leave. Not particularly useful prescience, but I think it goes to show that if you have a bad feeling about a relationship, you should listen to it.
Many eyes win in blogging as well as in OSS :-)
"On Monday, Tribune accepted Zell's bid -- slightly more than $13 billion, including debt -- to buy Tribune and take the company private"

That's a pity. Now I can't short them.
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
I've seen dating sites for sale that come loaded with fake profiles. Generally, it seems like a really bad idea.
Sounds interesting. I have my pet project in more or less same field, which i would implement once i get some cash inflow.
Smarter part of social networking is get your employees for free ;D
If you employ people and engage them in content management or info retrieval..it would end up being a costly affair. Instead allowing users to push in content is a smarter way to get traffic plus getting things for free. Now using a bot inside such a site would repeal traffic as they would view anything and everything as a bot. No one wants to talk to bots, they want to interact with a smarter being like them.
Kleiner Perkins Partner: If by Web 2.0, you mean companies that build an audience to be monetized by Google, I am not actively pursuing them.
How did you know the profiles were fake?

The idea is to make the bots convincing.
Demomyapp.com - Showcase your demo to the world
I liked the article, but had a hard time connecting it to the title.

I think, based on the title, the author was implying that SalesGenie is a "big company" while GoDaddy is a startup. GoDaddy is younger, but it's not much smaller. SalesGenie.com's revenue in '05 was $383 million while GoDaddy's estimated revenue was $200 million.

Sources:
http://biz.yahoo.com/e/070315/iusa10-k.html
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7BBE70F068-321F-4777-8640-ECAACDBA077D%7D&source=blq%2Fyhoo&dist=yhoo&siteid=yhoo
Jamie (jamiequint), Sumon (sharpshoot) and I(timmmah) put this together over one all nighter. We were frustrated that there was no place we could show off puzpix.com to everyone, so we made this. Add your demos! (YouTube Screencast Required) Start changing the world.
"With its expansive views of the San Francisco Bay and sky-high electricity usage included in the rent, that high-rise is now dubbed the "Yscaper""

Skyscraper - Yscraper, home to six ycombinator startups.
Timmmah did the awesome design :)
Not that I would defend the term, but that seems a straw man definition. In fact, he has to take it back in his next response.
Earning off Google adsense is not a business, it is a hobby. Very few startups manage to squeeze a reasonable profit off Google.

Advertising is, of course, a feasible business. But no one (this especially applies to geeks) clicks on Adsense ads anymore because they are so used to seeing them. My suggestion is to develop a custom ad delivery system, or manually post sponsored ads (just as TechCrunch does).
This is an awesome "I can't believe I haven't thought of that" kind of idea. I love the RSS feed.

I'm sure you guys will be getting a ton of submissions from desperate entrepreneurs like myself :)

You might think about implementing some reddit-style voting system, since you'll probably be getting a lot of self-promoters and the spam that comes with them.
My stereotype is exactly the opposite: hackers and nerds are going to be malnourished or overweight, but less likely to be of healthy proportions. I'm certainly well overweight myself.

I'd be intrigued to hear what "they must have parents" might have to do with it. :)
Where do you colo your servers?
Instead a model that would help them reach people, casual surfers can be made potential customers, educated customers would spread it around. This food chain will make everyone happy. I dont know if it would go as planned but still whats there to try :-)

So there is lot of money in getting small startup companies into advertising and web 2.0 is just a beginning. If someone thinks google adsense is ultimate product, there are flaws and once can correct this and still make ad revenue.
Agree. I now laugh when I hear the Softies talk about how MS is competing with Google. That game is over. Google does not need to compete with MS, but MS must compete with Google. It is also sad to see their current ad campaign with the dinosaurs...do they even see what they are doing? I went back to Mac 4 years ago and have never looked back. I am am one app away from being completely Microsoft free!

If they did not have so much cash I would short the stock.

Davo
Just wondering, for those of you running your own servers, where do you keep them?

I started out with my boxes in my dorm room, under my bed :) Kept the bed warm, and I appreciated the "white noise," but reliability left something to be desired.

Any other stories? Does anyone know of a cheap colo in Boston/SanFran that will rent you 1U at a time?
Filtering is in the near future (meaning as soon as school work relents) :)
Although I totally agree that Macs are far superior, I don't share your surprise when I come across a PC. Apple are definitely gaining traction, but Micrsoft still commands most of the market.
Bots and fake profiles suck and your visitors will smell them a mile away.

Throw a party for your friends, have them all bring laptops and make up a drinking game around posting things to Study Stickies. Or you could just ask them to do it. You should throw up an "About/How to/FAQ/Tour" to explain what your site is.
How Microsoft Is Losing Its Way
Send out a press release NOW! While you're aiming for a different audience than vator.tv, you can really leverage the buzz/scandal behind vator.tv and Bambi Francisco to your advantage and get your site known.
I've had a box at Serverbeach for a few years, and they've been very reliable, and are pretty cheap. There's been a single issue I was unhappy about, which was a mandatory IP change for my box due to a reconfiguration of their network (after they were bought by peer1, a fiber/bandwidth company).

All else has been nigh on perfect. They do expect that you'll handle everything yourself that can be handled remotely, though I wouldn't think that was a problem in this crowd. :)

Edit: Er, and if you do choose to go with them, email me for a discount code if you want one.
It's quite funny you say this, because even their Ajax initiative deliberately sucks!
We're a competitor to ASP.NET Ajax and we're not even afraid of them!
Sure they've got like 10 000 more downloads per month than us, but their product quality sucks to such an extent we think they've with purpose built it bad just to make sure it's good enough for developers to embrace it but bad enough it'll take ten years to build Office with it!
Someone at MS once said; "for someone to take the lead over MS today means MS must 'bend over' and let themself become the IBM version 2.0", well that's just what they're doing in these days! And we're here to "plug" them!! ;)

PS!
ajaxwidgets.com

.t
There's two versions of the IDE -- Professional and Express. Express is absolutely free and meant for enthusiast game developers.
Giant Cadbury egg
I think as much as Kleiner may not be interested in web2.0(or so they say), many web2.0 entrepreneurs aren't interested in Kleiner either as much as they previously used to be.

For example, in web2.0 world a 15mil exit is considered pretty nice. But for Kleiner a 15mil acquisition of a portfolio company doesn't necessarily get them jumping.
Softlayer. Pretty good service.
I think I'm in the younger half, so I felt this should be the old news.

But the day which I finally don't use Windows while I'm work is going to be several years later from now.
Y Combinator is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnTy_smY3sw&NR
Microsoft is dead because their primary product is sold to sheep, who buy the biggest instead of the best. ... How long did they work on Vista, and how bad is it? Too long, and awful!

Long live Apple! Gimme an iPhone now!
for that u need a good AI bot.
Impressive stuff. All these humanoids and robots used to be forte of japanese and its good that there are more advanced stuffs in here. One japanese guy had joked to me once saying that all those outdated stuff in japan comes to US. Now i think he wil soon take back his words
CI Host... Terrible... Probably going to switch.
I wrote a big reply, and by the time I submitted it, it said it was an unknown link. :(
I like to use the name of the company in place of "I" or "We" because it reminds the customer who you are. Also, it's good for search engine positioning.
BTW, do you object to the use of bots in http://espgame.org?

Did you even know that it uses bots sometimes?
Clearing Your Inbox with Minimal Pain
Well, I don't know much about markets and such, but I know this. There is no spontaneous positive buzz about Microsoft anywhere -- not even on sites where Microsoft is king. There is spontaneous positive buzz about Apple, everywhere -- even on sites where Microsoft is king.

It isn't hard to see. Microsoft may not be dead, but they have definitely dropped the soap.
Understanding Traffic Statistics
Paul Lauterbur, MRI inventor (6/May/1929 - 27/Mar/2007)
Very strange notions of "success," if you ask me. To me, if you're in a "startup" only to be acquired, then you're not in business, you're in speculation, and you've already started to undermine your longevity. Why go through all the pain and sweat of starting up a company if you don't want to be driving that company 20 years from now? What you're describing strikes me as a "flash in the pan" mindset. If all you want to do is start and then cash in, well, that's not starting up, it's just starting out.
Hey thanks, yeah was another i needed this - then lets build it overnight type sessions. We'll be introducing some awesome features to help create a great environment for those submitting apps. Look forward to spotting the next YouTube.

Please blog about this and send it out to other entrepreneurs who might be helped by this. Look forward to seeing your demos and comments :)
Hmmm, no mention of the close scrape with the DoJ (but for a change of government...).

And no mention of how the current EC drubbing has emboldened competitors to take the first tentative steps back out into the sunshine in decades?

Apart from this strange omission, I agree with the sentiment of this essay.

I wish I had kept the transcript of the argument I had with a Microsoft employee in one of their forums about 6 years ago.

At the end of it, he said something like, "well, good luck storming the fortress. The walls are pretty high and our war chest is huge!".

To which I replied with something like, "I am sure that's just the sort of thing the captain of the Titanic was thinking right up to the part where that iceberg ripped his boat apart like a piece of wet tissue".

I then went on to mention that bigger companies had fallen than Microsoft (can't recall the timing of Exxon, or whatever it was called).
This article doesn't make too much sense to me.

First of all, as Sam mentioned, the companies aren't that much different in size. GoDaddy is not a startup, it is now a pretty large company and anyone who has money to throw around on Super Bowl commercials certainly isn't a little guy.

Second, GoDaddy and SalesGenie have nothing to do with each other. GoDaddy sells domain names, SalesGenie deals with businesses needing sales leads. While it is silly that they didn't test in Firefox, their market probably doesn't use Firefox that much. I'm willing to bet that 99% of their customers use IE so it really doesn't matter that much.

Third, the number of people who actually know who Kevin Rose is or can recognize him is very small relatively. So while including him in their commercial might get a lot of webbies talking about it, it won't have any effect on the vast majority of their potential customers.

This article made a lot of apples to oranges comparisons.
The Economist on the April 4th, reported that Paul Lauterbur (6/May/1929 - 27/Mar/2007) passed away. Lauterbur discovered ...

'... how to get spatial information about atoms (showing the difference b/w heavy water & ordinary water) in a magnetic field, was scribbled on a paper napkin over dinner in a Big Boy restaurant in Pittsburgh, between two bites of a hamburger ...'

Hands up those who have had an MRI? It fits into this site about startups because of the nature of his creativeness. Doing things that would by todays standards label him as A) a terrorist (can't go mucking about with dangerous chemistry sets) and B) dosed up on Ritalin (because of the low boredom threshold).

'... as a teenager he built his own lab in the basement of his house, entranced by the strange vials in his chemistry set and by the stink of burning sulphur. ...'

Hmm I remember doing that, burning sulphur. Had a lab under the house. My dads vice held an old bent spoon where I could mix things up and burn them. It was the first time I found a noxious gas burning sulphur, looking at the small blue flame. Taking a small breath of the stuff gave me a bit of a fright as the gas (SO2 or sulphur dioxide) literally sucked my breath away.

Reference

[0] wikipedia, 'Paul Christian Lauterbur'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lauterbur
Couldn't agree more. This subject has in fact been in my mind since I switched to using Mac OS X. One would only have to look at Windows Vista to realise just how much MS has fallen behind. After years of development, hypes, numerous delays and billions of dollars spent, all it could come up with is a product that devoids of any innovation. What a disappointment. Curiously, MS has further shot itself in the foot by releasing so many versions of the OS and confused its loyal users in the process. A case in point, it has abandoned "Pay For Sure" music copy protection, leaving its loyal partners and users in the lurch. It goes to show just how deperate MS has been trying to catch up (let alone compete) with its competitors. Would the company disappear tomorrow ? No, Is the company dying ? Yes. Is it the beginning of the end ? Yes.
'Express' ... but there's an annual $99USD cost to join the XNA club to get access to the means to play your creations on the XBOX. But that doesn't stop using your own machine.

It's like the Vintage Microsoft of old giving cheap access to their development tools and with a bit of an extra cost platform.
Good call Sam. I should have chosen a better title. Maybe something like, "If you have $2.5M to spend on marketing you should at least spend $15/hr on website testing."

The funniest thing is if you google "salesgenie superbowl commercial" our blog is the second result.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=salesgenie+superbowl+commercial&btnG=Google+Search

We got a lot of click-throughs from a small town in Iowa which happens to be the home of Salesgenie.
Holy. I don't really get it. If the weeblies save up on ice cream they can at least buy some uh... healthier food. The fats and lactates in ice cream don't seem anything like brain food. Somehow I find it less of a break of concentration than an irresponsible disregard for one's own health.
It depends on the level of reliability that you need, and the level of
control...

At the company I work for, we lease space in datacenteres in a few spots
around the country. [1]

The thing is, we do this because we have specific hardware requirements
which require that we use our own hardware, and ensure we can't use
anyone else's stuff very easily. The problem is, we pay through the NOSE
for it.

IMO, the optimal choice for most startups right now is to have very
few servers (if any) that their run in-house, and to host the rest with
other people.

There's a couple of reasons for this- The first is reliaiblity. Hosting
companies have trained staff watching over the servers, and monitoring
for a failure.
While you might do a lot to watch for failures [2], you'd save sleep and
sanity if you only needed to monitor for logic failures, and had someone
else (the hosting co) helping watch for hardware problems.

The second major reason is Bandwidth! Getting quality, symetric
bandwidth run to your door costs a LOT of money.. SpeakEasy DSL can get
you started [3], you'll struggle to get anything higher that a 6.0/1Mbit
line- For hosting, you need LOTS of upload- That 1Mbit will get taxed
out quickly.

Take a look at Bandwidth offerings by Colos- Often you get Royally
screwed, when compared to renting a dedicated server from them.
Companies like ServerMatrix will give you 1.5 TB of monthly bandwidth
for under $100.... That'd cost hunderds for the bandwidth alone in most
colos.

The dedicated server places tend to assume you won't fully use the line,
so they oversell- That's how you can get th e great deals on bandwidth..
The nice part is that if you go with a at least semi-reputable place
(servermatrix, rackspace, etc) they have MORE than enough to cover you,
even if they'll a littel annoyed that you use it all ;)

Read your TOS carefully.

Amazon's EC2 program is amoung the best for hosting, if you can get into
it. It allows you to dynamically scale up the number of servers, and has
very decent prices.
This is among the best options for a startup because you can load
balance to handle spikes in traffic, such as Digg, Techcrunch or Slashdot.

One other point I'll briefly touch on is depreciation of assets- If you
buy your own servers, and add them to a colo, when they get old, you
lose a lot of the initial value. You're often not going to want to keep
the old servers in the farm, once they're so low they'll do more harm
than good. With renting servers, along with the additional bandwidth and
uptime, you get the advantage of being able to just say "I'm done with
these servers.", and lose nothing.

-Colin

[1] I can't actually tell you the places for confidentiality reasons,
but it's not important for this discussion anyway.

[2] Nagios Alerts to the Cellphone are a good start..

[3] Chosen because of good TOS, and reputation, but with the Bestbuy
deal, be on your guard here. The situation could change quickly.
Excellent, I absolutely love this. My only suggestion is to trim down the copy. "A place for hip early-adopters to try the next big thing" (in a larger font) would be much better.
Jaiku Tips the Tuna?
Thanks ALex for the suggestion :)
If that is what his employment agreement states, then he has answered your own question.

I can see google making a case that he "used" code from google or something; remember it doesn't have to be true to take you to court or bog you down for months and thousands of dollars. For google lawyers it is signing few sheets of paper, for you it'll be putting your life on hold.

Best to resolve this before you start IMO.
That man is scaryyyy
WebHostingTalk.com for all of your questions about where to host and with whom. We use WebAir based in New York, I've got a direct line to the CEO whom is always willing to help in a sticky situation. The only problem I've ever had with them is during setup of our last system, they gave us the wrong speed Xeons in our quad box, which was fixed within 30 minutes.
In amazon's data centers! Go EC2 ;)
That's a rotten business that has to use bots to make the site look busy. After a while you will start believing that those bots are actually users and think your site is being used by 1000s of people - until reality hits you some sunny day. Instead invest that time in getting users. It's not easy - but neither is it THAT hard!

At least when you catch some sort of fire and start getting a decent stream of traffic, it will be something you can be proud of and build on.

About dating sites using bots - states are now enacting laws to regulate that. Watch out.
Cool - my brother uses Serverbeach and I've heard good things from him as well.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, Steve from Reddit.com was saying they've had a good experience with Server City, which will rent out fractions of a cabinet. I think they're based in Cambridge.
maybe it would be good if the "Share on YC" bookmark went to a review process before actually being posted.