skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for posting this. Here is the aritcle from the beginning:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_1.html

Eventhough Bezos is obsessed with good UI's, Amazon has one of the worst user interface. I have observed many people have trouble even logging in to buy a book! The good thing, though, is that these issues are not impossible to solve; implying that Amazon has much more potential than is currently presented.
Very nice blog posting. Its amazing how such a low percent can equal that amount of money.
My guess is that the real money here is in a product placement advertising model, rather than licensing the platform.

They'll get some valuable patents for technology they develop, and a few hundred bucks each off the few hundred people who want to broadcast their life 24/7/365. But a big .tv-star will be able to bring in $K a day just to test a Segway, show up at the right restaurant, attend the launch party for a new startup, etc.
Understanding Avatars (w/ many examples)
Hiring top notch employees is kind of like dating. People want a company that is seen as desirable by others much like how people seek a mate that is desirable from others. Unlike the dating world, alot of special attention early on to woo the prospective employee doesn't come across as "creepy" :)
shennanigans!!!
Money quote:

"Affiliate marketing networks like Commission Junction and LinkShare are screwed. These networks also operate on a cost-per-action basis, mostly with online retailers. Even though some of them have scale, they will not have the ability to compete with Google on sheer size of network."
I've had to setup cc processing for my past business before. Its not that hard at all and can be done cheaply. You can use curl in php and send all in the background so that the user doesn't have to see some generic "check out" page that looks nothing like your site.

The big thing to watch out for is hidden charges, cost of chargebacks (You'll get a few of them no matter how great your service is, mostly out of "friendly fraud"), gateway fees, etc.. These costs can rack up really fast and can turn you upside down. I'd say almost 90% of merchants out there are paying too much for their processing services.

Finally, go for a dedicated merchant account, not some 3rd party trash thats basically a reseller. With a dedicated account, you get paid almost right away into your bank, instead of weekly. Also, a 3rd party biller is many times more likely to wait until your balance gets high, then terminate your account for some make believe breach of service, possibly destroying your company in minutes. Theres very little you can do to stop this, lawsuits take forever, and even big name billers will do it to you. Be careful.
AdBrite coexists with Adwords despite having a similar CPC model. CJ and LinkShare can either choose to have a head-on fight with Google, and lose. Or they can innovate to provide the same product (PPA) with a better service.
Prediction: At least two of the first ten .tv-stars will attempt a Borat style character.
Yeah, this is nice. The existing aff marketing networks are filled with all sorts of shysters. Shaving sales and unjustified termination of accounts before payment is sent is very very very common. This will put alot more honesty in the affiliate marketing area, which is a cesspool now.
I wanted to send the male escourts to their place...
PPA is certainly a great relief for advertisers. An interesting question, though, is whether such an offering is actually beneficial to the publishers? Domain-parking sites, in particular, might fail to generate profits through PPA and therefore stick with CPC instead. This advertising model might fail to scale if it is not mutually beneficial for both, advertisers and the publishers.
Yeah, I remember this. It's classical.
It's true that the market has room for more than one player. It's just that if one of the players is Google, and since Google is offering significant integration advantages with Adwords (see comment #4 on the techcrunch article), then CJ and Linkshare are going to lose serious market share. The "800-lb gorilla" title is going to shift overnight. They are in a pickle, to be sure.
In Canada at least, legal notices are not themselves protected. The same is probably true in the US. You can copy them, but obviously someone else's policy might not be what you want.

(IANAL, I could be wrong and often am, this is not legal advice, etc. etc.)
I think you'll see minimal impact on the landscape for publishers-- if they used CPA/aff before, they'll continue to use CPA-- Google is just another CPA source to them. Same with CPC.

The only shift I can imagine happening is that some CPC publishers will shift to CPA, as the overhead associated with evaluating the various affiliate brokers and opening accounts, etc, just got eliminated, as the publishers already have an existing relationship with Google.
"I used to say that the web browser was the most hostile programming environment ever devised, but that was before I found out about Mobile." -Douglas Crockford
This is something that I've been interested in for awhile. I tried to set up a system that would target ads to users based on the information that I had in my own database instead of what was on a specific page. If your pages require a user to be logged in then the google bot can't access that data, so you get poor ads. It would be great if I could scan the data internally, then send a keyword request to Google, or whomever, and get back ads based on the information I sent. That way I can keep my users data private while still providing them high quality targeted ads. Does anyone know of an ad company that allows that?
Justin's speaking at startup school; maybe that's what you're thinking of.
Could'nt have said it better myself. Question is "when" will the carriers be just in charge of data pipes?
Yup thats the confusion. Thanks
Can you outline specific providers to consider and/or avoid?
I've done the copy/paste/find&replace stuff before with legal terms. It's done alot more than you realize. Even lawyers do it sometimes. Once you start growing/getting users, then its probably better to find an honest lawyer.
Maybe, but there may be better ways of showing the same info.
Management really isn't that difficult. Its just unfamiliar because we've been told what to do for a really really long time, and finally having to tell yourself to tell somebody else what to do might seem strange. Its all in thinking outside of your head and paying attention to what is going on, and seeing things from other's perspectives.
Justin: You guys should put a comments section on your vid clips.

Maybe it's time for Justin to consider hiring a bodyguard.
The 10 rules at the bottom are the characteristics of good managers, startup or not. Unfortunately, most managers fall victim to a few of these, especially #2 (Never waste time justifying past decisions or trying to rescue failures) and #10 (Be honest). It's amazing how often bad managers fail at both at the same time.
Getty images buys "citizen journalism" photo site Scoopt
Remarkably honest. Usually these kinds of 'opportunities' hold back the key information: that they making their money by selling you the opportunity.
"Facebook Sneak Preview" will show upcoming feature additions and changes before they go live
Southwest has a "Chief Apology Officer"
Is Web 2.0 over and out?
Yeah, this article hit home. I've got funding/idea/biz plan and have been looking for some co-founders/employees, but everybody I have met thus far would be bricks (dead weight) in the equation.

I'm going to meet as many people as I can at startup school, but will probably need to go further than that. I've had a startup before, and learned alot from it, but I wasn't in the "startup community" at all. As far as working for a startup, many founders won't want you networking for your own stuff, they want you performing tasks for their function. So it has to be done either covertly, or in the open with the founders blessing.
I agree with the others that you shouldn't focus on an API for rev 1.0 in order to get the product to market. But I would be careful and architect the code such that it can support an API...otherwise it's going to be a real pain in the rear to retrofit.
GTD: How to Deal with Myriads of Pesky Little Things
Interesting article, but I wouldn't always believe those charts right away.

A graph of a coin toss can even look non-random...
Use Hosted Trials for your software product
I used card service international (owned by linkpoint), which had some hidden charges but wasn't too bad in the end.

That was over 2 years ago. I don't know what is good now. ccbill, epoch, ibill and many others are all 3rd party and charge sometimes near double digit discount rates when all the fees are factored in.
JustinTV is SO addictive!
How does the Steve Martin bit go? "How to become a millionaire: first, get a million dollars..."

Anyway, I'm not a big fan of these sort of made-for-Digg articles written by SEO people looking for positive google juice.
Also, when total investement doubles from $406 M to $844 M...that's a huge change in the market. It's hard to believe that a change in valuation from $6.63M to $6M is an independant variable that should be taken seriously.

Also, also, the charts are for all VC money not just 2.0 (i.e. networking etc.) companies.

My favorite piece of evidence on the demise of 2.0 is Your election to person of the year. By time a trend makes it to the cover Time, it must be over!
Is buying startups the new R & D?
That's a couple in as many years and I bet there are more to come. It's getting easier to get a critical mass of images that you have enough rights to sell (or collaborate in the sale of) and I don't think there's reason to believe Getty will stop defending this way.
Expedia alums launch startup - competes with Inkling?
Yeah I think if you did a "top topics" or some such thing that would really help. It'd get some activity going at least. I like the idea of "topical chat" though so I'll keep checking back.
Why the Semantic Web Will Fail - Any startups betting on Semantic Web?
Great Tool - Get Answer In One Click
ABC trying new commercial formats
There's some great stuff in here about the problems with television advertising, the issues with transferring that advertising to the web, and some hints about some interesting market opportunities.

If you are planning on an ad-based revenue model, it would be foolish not to learn about the issues the largest ad-based entertainment venue (TV) is having.
How could a phrase that never meant anything in the first place be over?

What one would really have to ask is, is the Web over? And when you phrase it that way you realize what a ridiculous question it is.
pg: looks like someone picked up "hiring is obsolete" and decided they could rewrite it for a mainstream news outlet.
The Next Social Web
This is a great lesson. A small piece of something big is worth less than a large piece of nothing!

Now, what are the odds that there is gonna be another IPO this decade so that 0.1% of the pre-IPO stock ends up being worth $100mm+? And what are the odds that you'll be the part of it? :)
i'd agree
I read the whole article and still didn't see how show stopper ads would work. Does it just go straight to the ad seemingly out of nowhere? Thats the equivalent to a popup/under in the web world.
Of course Venture capital investment is down. People are self funcding...
If some advertisers shift from PPC to PPA, it sounds to me like there will be a drop in PPC prices. Which in turn may lead to revenue problems at many advertising supported sites. Also, not every site is suitable for PPA - since they won't convert well (domain parking being an extreme example). It will be interesting to see if there is any impact on Google's short term revenue.
Interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: "You don't learn very much when you yourself are talking"
Doesn't seem sticky enough for me.

Yer basically playing out a concept to see if you can do it and then you can either break it down and turn it into a licensing kit idea for people and get the masses to start creating their own, and adding their own personal style to it.

If you don't sell it ya got about a month until someone learns from your idea and rips it off and now yer bleeding.

Still isn't sticky.

You could play it up more and do more truman like things to it, but then yer dancing into the realm of staged content, and the real effect could wear off, but as if people really think reality shows are all that real anyways, theres always a camera man there watchin people.

I dunno. Still biggest thing for me as a would be watcher, needs stickyness. I like the fact you can embed justin like a widget, and all the bits you have to rss it out etc is nice but overall stick is lacking.

Spend, Build, Learn, Craft, License, Sell thats yer best bet here. I seriously doubt these guys can go a year, and if they could i mean my god, gun to head please, eventually the audience will WANT you to turn the thing off. People like blogs for stories and threads and ideas that get manifested into an entry, in a real time stream, that after thought processing isnt there, so you may see it you may not, stickyness is relying solely on the person in play and whether or not somethings really interesting to see.
Alternate title: "How to start a pyramid scheme in 10 days"
A place where you can see web 2.0 services being developed in real-time?
Would that be interesting? You get to see web 2.0 services in development from the very beginning. Many of these services might not even allow you to enter any data, but at least you would get to see what they look like on a daily basis. You can give really early feedback as well.
Web 2.0 is a great fish market....NOT
I think mini documentaries about startups would be awesome. They could use the justin.tv tech, maybe ycombinator should do that for the next batch of startups.
We do develop javascript software live on our webserver:

en.gibney.org/javascript_software/
Many startups already let you do this, if you find them on launch. news.ycombinator's a good example: it was incredibly bare-bones from the beginning, and you've been able to watch it grow. If you were into Reddit at the beginning, you got to see that one evolve too.

A lot of the work in starting up a startup involves mundane things like setting up servers, version control, feedback links, testing, etc. There's really nothing to see there.

I'm tempted to open up my Subversion repository eventually (I started checking into svn after 1.5 weeks, when the app was basically nothing more than a login page), but I can't really do that until:

a.) We've launched, so that we actually gain any of the publicity benefits of being an "open" startup

b.) We have enough of a technological lead that it wouldn't be disastrous to have someone download the svn repository and immediately setup a clone. LiveJournal, for example, has gotten about zero leverage out of being open-source and had to deal with some fairly significant hassles.
Nice stunt:)
I'm thinking of doing something like this for a service I'm building to help people understand and remember books, videos, podcasts, online documents, etc.

Really early feedback can help me build a better user interface for example.
I will tell you why it's so freaking hard for single founders: It's so freaking lonely
That's a good page. The link is broken though (YC news picked up the period). Here it is again: http://www.fenwick.com/VC_Terms.htm
i could talk you about it days, blog about it until my keyboard dies, but the main point pretty much covers it all and its on the header
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:VuaNfoScr5IJ:www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2007/03/19/vh1-primes-pod-buster-format/+showstoppers+vh1&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=firefox-a

here's a google cache of a slightly better description... but still vague on the details.
Good News! CD Music Sales Down 20% from 2006
Tumblr: Blogging for the lazy
So find ways to make it less lonely.

I think that getting back frequent feedback can help in that regard, although it might also increase the chances that someone will copy your service.
I like it when people launch apps similar to the ones I'm working on, shows that other people have the same problems :)
Most founders with families in the startup stage of business don't see them that much anyways. Plus you have to network alot so you're always seeing people.

However, there would be a lacking of intimate contact. You can bond with other founders but that only goes so far. Society as a whole is becoming increasingly isolated. Many people have hundreds of friends on their "friendspace/mybook", but deep down have no one to really confide in.
Are you in college?

If you aren't enroll part-time. Join every biz/ad/entrepreneur club. Finding a great partner is hard - but far from impossible. Step 1 is to start meeting SOMEWHAT partner-ish people and college is a good start from my experience.
I think Metaweb is the only big name currently betting itself on the Semantic Web, though in a way that might let it route around some of the problems. For most other startups, the semantic web is a possible benefit, but not a necessity. Opportunistic utilization of semantic web tech can certainly benefit most web startups; the entire vision doesn't have to fly for us to derive some of the benefits.
When I get lonely, all I need to think about is some of the more annoying folks I've had to work with over the years. God bless em. A few minutes remembering their antics, and I appreciate my solitude anew.
I believe it. Oddly enough, it's lonely even when there are a couple of you. This is one of the main reasons we do YC in batches. The startups all become one another's friends, because they're all in the same situation.

I think it's well worth the inconvenience of moving in order to have a large group of energetic and sympathetic peers. That's the deal with college, after all.
ignore, silly bookmarklet!
Y Combinator Startup News
zaidf, amichail

the thing is that most of the time you don't care. But there are times that suddenly you become aware of it, and if its one of the times that it annoys you then it strikes you, and thats when you need maybe somebody to either support you (the case of someone who is active part in the early process of starting up) or fulfil it before it becomes a need. And as always you must get over it
Now. I feel like a complete idiot. And I've moved the bookmarklet off my toolbar so it doesn't happen again. ugh.

Here's a sug... you should be able to delete posts you added yourself.
It wouldn't be fair to delete a submission with an active discussion. Perhaps a parent submission with no children, or removable within a certain time frame.
has anyone found any of the various web2.0/entrepreneur meetups to be useful for this?

I'll be at the next web2.0 meetup in NYC -- http://newtech.meetup.com/21/
the peering and the environement of YC sounds a great place to be
Long hours without alot of positive feedback from the business you are building can be very lonely.

Its kind of like the first 6 months you are taking care of a baby, they really don't do much but need to be attended to constantly, and usually you can take solace in the sheer love of what you are making, but sometimes at 4 am when the little thing is crying and all you want to do is get some sleep and then you have to get up and go into work the next day anyway, having someone to share the experience with is great.

I like the idea of meetups, but I'm in the Hartford area, not sure there are a ton of startups around. What would be kind of cool though would be some kind of "Who's working on their startup now" list, maybe even here on YC's site, where people could sign-in when you start working and we could have some kind of quiet community, even if its just the ethereal prescence of our names.
Hardnosed negotiation HOWTO for hackers.
4 reasons why startup secrecy is overrated
Trust me I've gone through it. I've posted before my success ratio in partner versus no partner ventures. In my case I couldn't get over it and after few too many projects going no where, I decided to take the partner route.

I doubt I'll be starting anything in future without a partner or two.
How to market your startup
Seems reasonable. You should only be able to delete things that have no activity around them. Probably same for discussion posts w/ replies, and maybe even vote up/downs?
PassPack: Holding Your Keys for the 2.0 Kingdom
I disagree with his outlook on the music biz. I think that recorded music does have a value. Although there is a small cost to produce it these days every musician dreams of making money off of it. No musician enjoys giving their music up for free. They assume that it'll pay off in the long run(whether that be buying tracks on itunes, getting a cd or a tshirt at their show). Just because the current model for selling music isn't working and piracy is a popular alternative doesn't make music worth nothing.

Also, any band already relies on live concerts for their means of money. This is nothing new. What is happening is that major labels are getting a bigger piece of the pie when it comes to merchandise(which used to go straight to the band). I just think a new means of selling music must be created that benefits all parties.
2006 Web 2.0 Fundings Doubled to $844 million
I've found events such as opencoffee and barcamps to be encouraging. Only trouble is the barcamps only happen every few weeks
The Long Tail: Google's case against marketing
Definitely. I think there's more to it, but you've captured the fact the most the major downsides are emotional/psychological. There's no one to temper doubts. Worse, you're not letting anyone else down if you slack off; having others depend on your efforts is a powerful motivator.

"so freaking lonely" does sum it up pretty well though.
Digital content "wants" to be free. That's the problem for industries that have historically generated revenue by artificially restricting access to content: when content distribution (and even production) are without cost or restriction, revenue must come from other sources. This is glaringly obvious for music, and we're headed that way for film.

The film industry will do it's best to stay ahead of the bandwidth: 3D projection, better surround sound, etc, but will also need to adapt to make formerly secondary revenue streams (product placement, franchise merchandise, etc) more primary. That and they're going to have to find ways to get their costs down, significantly, to compete with a fast approaching internet and independent film community.
Tool to find a partner
if anyone on here is looking for a b-side partner, let me know.
myoung8 at stanford dot edu
you struck a chord here, buddy!
you are absolutely right.
That's why I like news.YC so much - clean wholesome fun. A watering hole for entrepreneur animals.
If you are looking for a cofounder, email me.
Validation of YC approach? ~ another vc funding webapps only
Startup Epicenter.  March 27-29th, Mountain View
I don't know much about the film industry so I won't try and touch on that issue. But with music, the content distribution is obviously free on the internet. Production is definitely not. If you're talking about a junk recording than yeah. But any band nowadays who is taking their careers seriously look for a producer, an engineer, and a good studio. These all cost money. And other sources of revenue have been created. Look at ringtones. I just believe that another type of approach to selling music has to be created.
By Guy Kavasaki: The guys at iInnovate posted a lovely interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Among the topics they covered were:

Anti-trust

Innovation

Competitive advantages

Motivation of entrepreneurs

Maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit

Traditional and non-traditional organization design

What Microsoft and Yahoo does that impresses him

Invention of disruptive technologies