skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
FACT: All companies dies eventually one way or another.

FACT: Microsoft is in the company I would like to see die the most.

Overall I wouldnt say that the company is dead yet, but I agree that they are dying. I do agree that the concepts on which they were built have died - this is probably what the author of this article really means. The body is dead but rigor mortis has not yet set in.

Im not sure I would agree with this Web 2.0 business. To me the web is a very vacuous place - all sizzle and no steak. Its mainly a playground for the porn industry and identity thieves, and Microsoft wannabees desperately trying to convince people something great is about to happen there. So far nothing great has.

In many ways the web is like present day hollywood with its boom-vrash flash-bang movies. Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. All sight and sound but no plot and nothing for the intellect.

The web is a wild west arizona desert - full of snake oil salesmen - its just the bandwidth is higher.
Its very difficult to be honest and altruistic when your sole reason for being is to make money. This is the motivation for these men that run businesses. Or do you suppose their motivation is to bring happiness to people? Morals and money dont really mix very well. When a companies board of directors sit down to discuss the bottom line, how often do you think moral issues are discussed? Ive never heard any in all my years in the IT industry.
I use both. When I'm speaking for "the community" or "the developers", i use We.

When I'm referring to a decision that I made as far as the direction of the site, i use I. (taking ownership and standing behind your beliefs)

it's a good question, though. I don't think there's a right answer, it's a question of what impression would you like to create.
I found mine through past work experience.

I approached two of the smartest hackers I had worked with, and showed them a very brief Keynote presentation followed by a demo of the concept I had been working on part time over the last 6 months.

The Y-combinator application process prompted me to expedite my search for other founders. I was originally planning on launching v.1 of the app before approaching them.

Take-aways from this:

It is tempting to get a co-founder quickly, if only to validate your idea. That's fine, but don't approach potentials just because you believe there is a high chance of them accepting. Always try to bring in the best people you know.

Know that you can work well together. Often said, but it's still worth repeating.

Presentations are great, but it's easier to convince someone to spend their time on an idea when you back your presentation up with a demo. Regardless of the outcome, you'll receive valuable feedback, and it's probably good practice for when you meet VCs.
cool!, why didnt I think of that!
Finally , some one came out with the best way to showcase an new apps , the smart way - from any way, anytime to everyone!
Didnt Paul Allen write most of the Basic Interpreter rather than Gates? I think he should be your hero.
Lets hope he succeeds.
Yes, they use bots to beat cheaters http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf

That's different than using bots to interact with legitimate users.

Watch Luis von Ahn's presentation of the ESP game at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=carnegie+mellon+image+game. It's very entertaining and you'll even learn why spammers host free porn sites even though they aren't in the porn business.
Do people really trust these web services with their private info? Is this the same web with all the spam emails - lottery wins, viagra sales, fake bank communications, etc? The web that is full of viruses? The web where no one really knows who they are dealing with?

These must be some strange new kind of human beings. Me, I trust no one.
We use Rackspace for Paragent.com. They are a little more expensive, but they handle all the os-level patching, backup, etc. We basically just worry about the application. It lets us focus on the aspects of the business we are best suited to handle, and leave the os-level management to people that devote a lot more resources.
The answer is yes. Apparently (as you already know) Google's employee intellectual property agreements say that they have the rights to anything developed while employed by Google. Read all the fine print and speak to a lawyer.

The short answer seems to be yes though.
I prefer "we's all" eg-

[cletus]"We's all had this here idea to create a series of tubes, and shazzam!...Now you gots tha internet."[/cletus]
The company is an entity. It would be appropriate to use "we" more often that not. Use "I" when talking about yourself or yourself on behalf of the entity.

The same should be said for 2 or 3 person teams. Try to get in the habit of thinking about the company as an entity bigger than yourself.
'... Leo Laporte jumped ship from Twitter to Jaiku, his 4,000 followers followed. ...'

Interesting thought. You build a company on relationships and the key influencer's leave and your user base is eroded. So just who is Jaiku?

I ran into Jaiku [0] after listening to Bruce Stirling. Bruce is a science fiction writer, appeared on the first cover of Wired and writes in his blog, beyond the beyond [1]. But I think he's a better orator than writer. Listening to a talk he gave at SWSX on ITConverstions [2], i found out about things like spimes, why the 'disembodied head of Alan Turing' would be beaten by google and Thinklinks.

Thinklinks [3] allow you to locate physical things by a unique id on the Internet. The creator of Thinglinks is none other than Ulla-Maaria Mutanen [4], the other half of Jaiku creator, Jyri Engestrom [5].

What I've tried to demonstrate is the connected nature of communities. Any service that tries to harness their power of connections can be just as easily burnt. This episode shows demonstrates to me there is less loyalty to services than the social network you inhabit.

ps: news.yc can't handle unicode.

Reference

[0] Jaiku, Helsinki based , shared presence startup, 'About'

http://jaiku.com/about

[1] Wired, Bruce Strirling blog, 'beyond the beyond'

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/

[2] ITConversations, 'Bruce Stirling, The Internet of Things, 58m, 26.4 mb, 2006MAR06'

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail717.html

[3] Thinklink, 'locate physical things by computers. My first thinglink a barcode has the thinglink of 499KCH

http://thinglink.org/thing:499KCH

[4] Ulla-Maaria Mutanen, 'Hobby Pricesss, craft website. Where craft meets geek'

http://hobbyprincess.com/

[6] Jyri Engestrom, 'Co creator of Jaiku'

http://www.zengestrom.com/
It depends on what your definition of "bot" is. Are you talking about when the ESP game records a person's session, then plays those moves back to other players (and other recorded sessions)? If enough about the recorded play is logged, why should the person playing interactively care?

I always thought that's one reason his games are so clever. You get better data out this way, too. Seems perfectly legit to me.
The first spam has hit news.yc....
I see the proper use of hyphens and em dashes in the article ...
From the paper:

"Having pre-recorded game play is especially
useful when the game is still gaining popularity. When
there are few players, only a single person will usually be
playing the game at a time."

So the ESP Game does use bots to make the site look busy.
Does it matter if the bot was constructed from prerecorded play or not? What if it was constructed from prerecorded play from multiple players? What if it combined prerecorded play with heuristics?

It's still misleading. The player is expecting to play with another human being live.
Mediatemple. Excellent.
1. It was an accidental post, not spam.

2. It wouldn't be nearly the first.
"[the data centres are] on track to be consuming half of all the world's output of electricity by the end of this decade."

Yikes!
I dunno about bots, but almost every social website I know is bootstrapped by having the founders comment back and forth with each other. There was an interview with Reddit where they said their first 2 months basically consisted of the two of them submitting every link they could find to their own site.

When I was at inAsphere.com, the first thing we did after launch was "Okay, I want every staff member to create at least 5 fake personas, and have conversations with yourselves." So we created accounts and came up with backgrounds and personalities and stuff, and had mock arguments with ourselves on the forums.

I know cross-x.com started the same way, since it was by the same founder.

The only website I've been involved with which didn't seed things with a bunch of fake usernames was FictionAlley. That was largely because the site was intended to be personal, for a few friends only, and only randomly happened to catch on among the general fandom. Since it was started with more than a dozen founders, they had ample material to begin with.
This would stop working once the ratio of total submitted articles to current active users got too high. Articles would start to appear on the random page so rarely that nothing could get a statistically significant number of votes.
I agree, my first thought was that how KP defines a good investment is somewhat orthogonal to how someone defines a good business.

You mentioned that a small exit is a home run for three guys in a room. Likewise, three guys in a room can be financed by Visa and Mastercard, they don't need KP.
True. I can relate to that. I personally have launched quite a few sites but if I can't get initial traction, I usually go back to the drawing board and figure out why or fold them - so clearly I have a bias against this business of fake personas and bots.

I was involved with a dot com back in 2001 where I did an internship. Our first week consisted of all the staff members(there were about 10 of them) creating accounts and contributing. BUT THAT WASN'T THE SITE'S MAIN MARKETING PLAN. That is what you have to understand. Bots and fake personas have very limited lifetime; at the end you have to get real users to make your site of some worth.
delete, by going to edit and removing the url & title. hit tab, then
enter.
Recommendation on hardware configuration to get started? (1 or 2 boxes?)
Of course; a site that's just the staff commenting back and forth to each other is really a circlejerk, not a webapp. That's what killed inAsphere: it really wasn't all that interesting. Even after getting all sorts of publicity, we weren't retaining visitors. And our existing userbase (we folded cross-x.com into it) was leaving not bringing their friends in.

But there's a difference between a site that sucks no matter what you do and a site that could survive on its own if only it passed the initial attracting-users hurdle. Reddit's a good example of the latter: I checked it out about a week after it launched, and it was really quite boring. I came back a few months later, and it actually had a thriving community. If the Reddit founders hadn't stuck with it and just folded the site, they'd be out a few million dollars.
I wanted to get some thoughts on what sort of hardware configuration I would need to get kicked off (1U colo). Do I need 1 web+1 db server day 1? firewall box?
This begs the question, how do you define a bot? From my understanding of the talk, they replay one person's session and don't use composites. But, point taken.
Useful for people evaluating whether to use a tag cloud as navigation

"We analyzed a popular social tagging site, del.icio.us, using
information theory. By analyzing various kinds of entropy,
which is a traditional information theory metric, we found
that, over time, del.icio.us is becoming harder to navigate.
Moreover, the collective of users (the crowd) is having a
harder time in tagging documents as the collection of
bookmarks grows unabated. This is somewhat intuitive,
since the amount of information being bookmarked is
growing extremely fast, and the usage and growth of the
Indeed, design changes and tools for social tagging are
tagging vocabulary become much more saturated.
Entropy,
as a metric, can also be used to drive system design choices.
We discussed several social tagging tools or modifications
to social tagging that could benefit from using entropy to
evaluate the effects. It is our hope that HCI researchers will
utilize this methodology to characterize future social and
collaborative information systems."
For the ESP Game, it might be the case that they replay one person's session.

But for Phetch:

"Emulating Seekers in a convincing manner is more difficult. If a real player enters useless
descriptions of the image, we do not want the emulated Seekers to find it. Although this is not a significant
problem since most Describers enter accurate descriptions of images, we nevertheless address it to protect
the illusion that a real game is being played. The solution to the problem relies on the fact that we are using
images from the ESP Game database, so the keywords associated with the images in the search engine are
already known. Therefore, we emulate Seekers by not guessing the right image until a certain number of
the ESP keywords have been entered by the Describer."

http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2005/CMU-CS-05-193.pdf#page=56
We're basically starting with the cheapest dedicated server we could find (single $79/month Celeron from GoDaddy). No, it won't stand up to any significant load. However, there's really no reason to pay a lot of money upfront when you have no idea whether your idea will even be popular at all. Might as well save the cash up front, and expand once you know what sort of load you'll be facing.

We keep all our config files in Subversion and try to automate as much of the setup process as is possible. Hopefully that'll let us expand quickly if we need to upgrade to a bigger box or split over multiple machines.
Microsoft is Dead: The Cliffs Notes
The Personal MBA (DIY MBA)
I'm not really a founder or an involved person, but has helped out on the project quite a bit. I'd be glad to give out an invite, but currently I do not have any more.

But Just in response, the nature of the limitations are to address real problems that exist in real dating sites at the moment. Also the social structure of the site is targeted more towards users who do not necessarily use such dating or social networking sites to find a mate, but to play it like a kind of social game.

It's definitely not for everyone, but it seems to be catching someones attention.

Regardless of that, they have a number of interesting pieces of technology in their site and groundbreaking ways to integrate them in useful ways. Whether or not the actual site is successful, it will be a point for many to learn about what a web service can be.
Response to "Note to content owners: DRM doesn't work"
The Casino Or The Bureaucracy
I get a kick out of these articles.

But, Google is my friend. I tell evey one that. Power beyond belief.

Meanwhile, when will MAC die?

I believe in opensource, and all the goodness there.

It is a global village. The MAC is too expensive hardware-wise, and well we don't call it M$ for nothing.

Adler
Phoenix, Arizona
Interview with Jaiku co-founder Jyri Engestrom
news.yc can't handle unicode :(
It's a good thing people react and then look. Google "microsoft is dead" and the number 2 result is headlined "Eight signs Microsoft is dead in the water - MarketWatch" dated May 3, 2006.

Is Dow Jones also irrelevant if no one is paying attention to it?
Just thought I would chime in here, from socialhelix.com

we are looking for a good deal too in the midwest, we are located in Milwaukee, WI and it seems like chicago is cheaper than Milwaukee area colocation services.

For now we are making use of a speakeasy 6/768 dsl line for our beta servers.

If barcampUSA panned out, we were going to offer our service to the public earlier and we were looking at getting a dedicated colo for 1-2 servers, but for now, our dsl is fine.
double post- delete
Financial Times, NY Times and local news papers may help.
Wamily.com actually switched off MT because of downtime & mysql problems.

MT will definitely be one of my first choices when they get all that sorted out, though.
PG, Why did you wish to be the first one to call it, btw?
...and Microsoft's software isn't?
Are Desktop Apps Dead?
I think the most interesting thing about article is that people who fall into the "old news" camp probably didn't need the Cliffs Notes to understand what Paul meant. Once I understood what the original essay was about, I wasn't reminded of Microsoft's balance sheet, nor did I think they would be going out of business. The fact that they aren't non-existent but are no longer relevant just seems... intuitive.
As a heavy Google user I would have to strongly disagree with you. Why? Microsoft might be trying to play catch-up with Google all the time, but there are more important things than Google. Sure I use Google and Linux all the time for all my docs, e-mail and just about all my work as well. Here's the thing though, a PC is still cheaper than a Mac even with Vista.
PC makers won't want to switch to Linux either because of tech support.
Microsoft still has a very big share of the market and no one can deny it. Sure the iPod helps Macs sell, but not enough for Microsoft to care.
Here's the argument, everyone needs an operating system and something that just works. Linux is still not for the average human, and PC makers won't resell something from Apple. Right now Microsoft wins, and probably will for the next five to ten years. Sure there are Firefox, Google, Linux, but people just want something that works and to be honest Microsoft offerings are good enough.

P.S. We need to remember that Microsoft has Xbox 360 and the Zune. All which work with Windows.
Jajah misleads the media with news on iPhone, LG Prada and Sony PSP
Internet leaks help independent labels and artists grow
Nice. I was in middle school 1993 and didn't get the references.
I wouldn't say PG is the first to call it. Joel Spolsky wrote an article with same jist a few years back (http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html), and I'm sure less known authors have been calling it before that. It's different when a big name with reputation on the line calls it, but Microsoft's being "dead" has been an open secret for a while.

I'm guessing I fall into this crowd: "The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news."
It saddens me that people needed the Cliff's Notes (Registered, Trademark, OMG WE PWNZ YOU) to understand what Paul was getting at.

I didn't actively think about it; however, when I submitted my YC app, Microsoft didn't even enter my mind as a potential competitor. I guess they COULD be, but it is a remote concern. Paul basically just put into words what was being subconsciously realized in the minds of web-geeks everywhere.

After reading comments on Slashdot (not generally a source for enlightened comments, I know), I also can't believe how people fixated on the "everyone uses Apples" remark. It should be obvious that Paul was referring to the group of innovative, young people that are developing the next wave of software.

And I am writing this from a Mac. (Yay!)
We don't have a PR firm. I think that reporter was introduced to the Justin.TVs by another YC startup. That's probably the reason there's so much press: each startup introduces reporters to the other YC startups. There are now 39 of them, so that's a lot of introducing.
Yep, this interview told me more about the changes that VCs worldwide are having to adapt to; learned very little about where web2.0 is and headed.
i don't think this move was necessary; people who didn't get the last article won't be placated by this article. people who did get it, will think as they have.

pg, it seems like you took the bait from the angry bloggers.
Sitting out on the infancy of web 2.0 (Kleiner Perkins/Microsoft) if you don't have eyeballs to appease (Google) makes heaps of sense.

User-generated content (I speak primarily of video as that is my research/startup focus) will be history in many niches as more and more companies get into the business of making excellent, interactive web video content. This superior content will have many unique and unobtrusive ways to be monetized, and in none of the ways (pre-roll, post-roll) ad companies are trying to fit to user-generated content.

I think, as this natural evolution occurs, we will see the likes of Kleiner Perkins and Microsoft bidding high and wide, as the next five years will be very kind to professional content providers.

They are skeptical right now because they should be. The attention span of the average web surfer is short as is his loyalty. A major content revolution is about to occur and it will be fascinating to see who the major players will be, and who (Youtube?) the major players won't be.

I am making a huge and possibly erroneous assumption that these early-stage 2.0 companies can't evolve into what I describe above. I base that assumption on inflexible attachments to branding (hangover from advertising 1.0). Much like a first impression, a brand is a difficult thing to change.
Apropos of Microsoft versus Google

A senior researcher from Google gave a talk at the compter science colloquium at my institution in December 2005. It was supposed to be about such things as the Google Maps API, but it really was a talk about how great it was to work at Google.

At the time, while doing research for my Strategic Defenestration Initiative (another story), I had read an editorial (URL: http://linux.sys-con.com/read/84967.htm -- the editor could use some editing) in Linux SYS CON which argued that LAMP and open source technology enabled Google and Amazon.com to grow "...quickly into industry leaders." The author pointed out that Amazon and Google were successful partly because LAMP technology allowed them to compete on an equal footing with Fortune 500 companies. And now they were successful enough to replace their open source Linux and Apache infrastructure with proprietary software systems (Windows) if they wanted, but they had not done so.

During the question and answer period, I asked the speaker whether Google had the financial and technical means to migrate their servers from Linux to Windows. He replied that they could do this. I couldn't resist: I then asked the speaker whether Google would go ahead and migrate all their servers to Windows.

His reply brought down the house: "if we did that, 90 percent of our engineers would quit on the spot."
thats not a bug ,,, it's a feature ~ http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/398269769
NAP of the Americas in Miami. World-class facility. It houses one of the root DNS nodes and also a lot of E911 equipment. Expen$ive but it's the only place in the States with good ping times to both Europe and SA. They handled the 2004-5 hurricane season with no downtime. It takes some cojones to put a datacenter 100 meters from the ocean.
I like the use of (sometimes completely inappropriate) pictures. It makes the blog post a lot more visually appealing.