skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kawasaki video: The Art of the Start in 30 minutes
"Google's name still comes up when any evil corporate behavior is discussed in any nerd community (not so much non-nerd groups) because of that great catch phrase, especially when Microsoft is mentioned."

I think it was Cringely who said something like: "Microsoft's slogan is similar to Google's, but slightly different. Be evil."
Cool site. Are you slowly indexing terms that people have 'voted' for by searching? I noticed that many of the terms I tried (specifically picked because I doubted they'd been searched for before, eg, Australian politicians) had zero results. I also noticed that searching for Hitler pegged one article in 2015.

Sudden and significant competition from Google must cut a bit, but there's at least a good chance that it'll just end up as another cool but abandoned (at least from a marketing perspective) Google product.
Is that what Juwo is trying to do? I could never figure it out.
I like it; the whole idea is fantastic!
Computing on the Cloud
Yes, I believe that what Juwo does is allow you to tag times in an audio or video file... he always said he was somehow different from the competitors but I was even more unclear on that.

Edit: it also did something with bulleted lists.
"Are you slowly indexing terms that people have 'voted' for by searching?"

Actually no, but we do direct our crawl to places where we expect to find the most data.

"I also noticed that searching for Hitler pegged one article in 2015."

If you click on the highest detail level you can see that this is a legitimate event. The copyright of "Mein Kampf" expires in 2015.

"Sudden and significant competition from Google must cut a bit, but there's at least a good chance that it'll just end up as another cool but abandoned (at least from a marketing perspective) Google product."

I have very mixed feelings. It's really too early to say exactly how I feel about it :-/
I would look at it like convertible debt. The co-founder gets x percentage of the company now OR you can buy that equity down in the future once you get funded. Keep it open so that if you work well together the co-founder can stick around and earn more equity. If you don't vibe, separate on previously agreed upon terms.
"Dell probably thinks they're doing their users a favor by loading a brand new computer up with every piece of software available."

No, Dell thinks, "Hey, free money!" Companies pay a lot to have their software pre-installed.
The Juwo dude needs to be able to explain his service with a simple phrase. For instance, "Scribd, youtube for documents". Because I have problems figuring out what its about. I also think he needs a web designer to help him out.
Update: Sorry, I just checked out the site. I guess he has a phrase now.
Still no arguments Harj. Don't debate if you don't have an argument.
http://juwo.com/main.html

Yeah, and then he needs to test his site in Firefox. And then he needs to get rid of the "Donate $5" link. And then he needs to drop his dependency on ActiveX _AND_ Java. And then...
Sam Odio: Real Person or Anybots (robot) prototype? ;)
Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy
I'm in awe (in a good way) that every time I check into News.YC, I see that Sam Odio has just submitted several links and commented on many more...

Is Sam a real person or is anybots about to release something amazing?

Actually, I think it's the former, but can't resist a bit of good-natured ribbing... now close that browser and do something productive! ;)
Keep going: he responds to feedback.
Why would age matter?

If you feel driven to start something, do it. If you can accept the risks, do it.

You pass through this realm only once; don't let a string of digits on your drivers license determine your life.
Summer Vacation
I did, too. Until seeing your comment, it didn't occur to me there was another way. I did think it was kind of obscure, though :).
Sorry to shamelessly link to my own blog, but I wrote this to motivate myself a bit, and thought maybe someone else would find it motivational. I'm about to quit my job for a few months of living off savings, and it's a bit scary for me.
Flickr Founder Apologizes over Censorship
"If they teach otherwise in business school, they're making things up."

This is an understandable belief given all the publicity the bad companies get. But what about the companies that do well and actually act in a moral way? There must be many of those as well, but not nearly as exciting to report on. Here's a rising bank that makes a very large point of their moral approach to running their business: http://www.bbt.com/bbt/about/philosophy/values.html

Maybe with the increasing leveling of the business "playing field" and the increasing openness of communication, businesses that actually act in ethical ways will gain ever larger advantages in winning and keeping customers over their less ethical competitors. A business that gains a reputation for integrity in its field that focuses on providing customer value will be hard to topple.
"Paul Graham is just showing off his mastery of Cambridgeian lingo"

Technically, it's "Canterbridgian". ;-)
What is the best way to manage database/table changes across multiple developers?
We use Subversion, so each developer has a local copy of the code on their machine. They also each have a copy of the database and table structure. What is the best way to manage changes in the database/table structure so that each developer is using the latest db version?
Russia accused of unleashing cyberwar to disable Estonia
And then he needs to stop using the "My First Webpage" style of links, "Click here", "Click here", "Click here". And then he needs to demote "(Note: No warranties nor liability, express or implied)." from being a banner headline. And then he needs to...

http://juwo.com/nodepad/demos/boss/dentist.html

Oh, dear lord.
"Microsoft is dead" - style essay from 1997, by John Walker, AutoDesk founder
I think the corporate world is designed to eliminate any desire of employees to work on their own ideas. Work takes up a lot more of your time and energy than you imagine. Even if you only work 40 hours a week.

In reality you get up, spend 30 minutes getting ready, another hour eating and commuting, more like 9-10 hours a work, another 30min or an hour getting home. After this whole ordeal you don't have any desire to even THINK about anything except relaxing.

On the weekends you're trying hard to find something to do that gives your life some kind of meaning besides the job you have.. something that doesn't include sitting in front of a computer.

The only way you can really work on something of your own is to quit your job and live off your savings. And still it's up for debate how much one person, without any investment can achieve working by themselves. You might be able to make a simple website.. But you won't be able to pay to promote it.
You might consider making him/her an employee and creating some sort of vesting schedule based on predetermined milestones achieved and / or hours put into the project.

This way you can retain the right to break off the arrangement, if things are working out.
all your base are belong to us.
I think Sasha Baron Cohen is a bit smarter than most of us on here.
I'm the guy who wrote this blog entry on relationship marking and grouping, and I just found this news.ycombinator.com site via my referrals.

Of course, I was familiar with ycombinator, but not this news page. Thanks for including my article here, and timg, thanks for the kind comments :)
Interesting, although I have to say that I never felt the need to buy a Java book (not even Hibernate or Spring books), because the online documentation available is so good. I bought two Ruby books and a Groovy book because the online documentation available seems rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps that is just me, but if not, it would shed a different light on the book sales numbers.
And perhaps remove the religious info from the "Company" page (http://juwo.com/company.html) -- it strikes me as unprofessional and out of place. You're entitled to your beliefs, but I can't see what you have to gain by advertising them on your corporate home page. Religion is a sensitive topic, and getting people to use your software is hard enough without offending them first.
Google's Potential Vulnerability - An Open Ad Network
What, no secret handshake?
I've been lucky so far with Dell: my lapatop came without leechware, and other computers at least came with a CD so I could reinstall a pure OS myself.

Anyway, what I don't like about Google is that they are not very open about their data collection policies. Every product they publish seems on the one hand to be very useful, on the other hand it always seems perfect for collecting even more data.

Google Earth - everyone bookmarks their own home first, right? So Google now knows where you live (they probably knew that before anyway, but still)

Google Mail - uh, oh...

Toolbar - track EVERY webpage you vist, and who knows what Google knows about your local hard drive? After all, if you search something local, and nothing is found, search automatically continues on Google, I think? So Google at the very least knows what you think is on your local harddrive...

And so. It just annoys me that they pretend to be so innocent - I don't really blame them for collecting the data, it's their business, but they shouldn't pretend to not be evil. It just rings dishonest to me.
Just shoot yourself on your 30th birthday...
Yeah, seriously... I was rejected at YC like 8 months ago (didn't want single founder) and we are doing just fine. I really respect all the advice and connections that YC has, but just because you are rejected doesn't mean anything.

My company is ClassOwl (classowl.com), we are in Alpha right now. And no, we're not another cliche Web 2.0 company.
I like your UI better than Google's. This may be an opportunity for more publicity.
Hmm, I'll think about this one. Proxies are so far complex to install, perhaps this can be streamlined.

I end up backing up an ever-growing scrapbook archive out of my PC every month. Perhaps most people don't care about backups. With hard disk capacities growing as they are, 100MB/month compressed may be a reasonable rate of disk usage.
I must confess, I am jealous that juwo is getting so much better feedback than I am :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=22129
If YC is doing anything wrong, it is that it is too transparent. Imagine if some of the top Wall St firms were as open about their business dealings. It would redefine the whole meaning of "Clubby".
I've reworded the first sentence to "The information will not be connected with you." Is that less misleading? It seems to me that kind of statement of intent is the best I can provide.
BBC NEWS | Business | Google wins adult photos appeal
I am currently reading "The fates of nations". The resonance with this story is very strong. Perhaps that's just a testament to how good a book it is.
Are you living 2.0?
I am wondering how much all of you embrace the web 2.0 lifestyle. For example do you host your photos on Flickr, share your bookmarks on delicious, blog on MySpace?

I think all those services are interesting, but I can't bring myself to use them (yet). I'd rather have open source engines that I could use on my own server for photo galleries, blogs and whatnot. I like to keep my bookmarks private etc.

Am I just too old fashioned for the modern world? Is the personal homepage dead (I guess so)? Should I readjust to get a feel for what people really want?
On a side note, what is the problem at Justin.tv, if there is one? The article mentioned that it is in free fall - really?

Justin.tv page seems to not work in Firefox anymore, so I couldn't see any announcements they might have made on their web page.
Andrew Chen: Forget advertising - will virtual goods be the killer revenue model for Web 2.0?
The future of venture capital from VC Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf
Alas, Sam is real. He mooched off my couch for three days last month. Although, my electric bill was rather high that month. Maybe he wasn't sleeping, he was recharging. ;-)
Hystry is not something I'd use, but the demo impressed me. It seems to work simply and as advertised with no hassle and no frills. It does miss some changes though, e.g. on reddit a bunch of parent comments were listed as having been modified but the child comments were not.

This seems like it would be better implemented entirely client-side. That way the privacy concerns automatically disappear, it'll be more responsive, and your server won't have to expend a lot of bandwidth/CPU/disk to fetch, create and store all the diffs.
And that humans (even the old models a few thousand years ago) also include a brain which among others can perform operations like simple multiplications....
Anyone have any idea how successful facebook is with gifts?
Sorry. I was referring to his username.

I had a faint recollection that Don had used onethumb in the past, and the website was the best evidence after a quick Google.
Usability - when should you make the users' choices for them?
Video of Guy Kawasaki pitching and demoing products - when he's in his true element, he's so kickass!
you have no chance to survive make your time.
I've read in a number of places that facebook is profitable. Siince their ad revenue is so low, you've go to imagine flyers + gifts are making up for the difference. Seeing that they've hired so many engineers, you've got to reckon they're racking in tons of $$$.
Haha, I have actually met Sam several times, slept on the floor of his apartment once or twice, almost crashed his Segway, took his money playing poker, and got drunk with him, so I can vouch for his existence. At one point he actually wrote one or two lines of code for Wamily, but was always on YC news all the time we had to let him go.

(kidding about that last part)
Tim O'Reilly says that himself - he basically built his business around bad documentation. That reminds me, his Alpha Geek talk is exceptionally good.
The Alpha Geeks - Tim O'Reilly [MP3]
I've been recently relistening to the best interviews and talks from the last few years that I remember, and this one really stuck out (both in memory, and when I listened to it again).
Let me guess: most failed startups are also run by 20 and 30 year olds.

I intend to wait until I'm 87 to start my company. We all know of failed startups that were founded by 20, 30, or 40-somethings, but you almost never see a failed startup with an 80-year-old founder. I'm sure that means something.
Is angel investment just for pre-VC companies?
Relevancy?
Perhaps you could clarify something that's puzzled me. I thought when I first heard about it, the phrase was "Do no evil". Then "Don't be evil" became more prevalent. Was there ever a switch, or was it just mis-reported initially?
Most of us just submit and post under the shared Sam_Odio account.
I personally know no one who has bought one of these gifts. I can certainly envision people doing so, but not really on a large enough scale to be highly successful with it. Of course, this is all based on personal experience and supposition :).
Be like Google and don't cache rich media in the proxy, just text/html, etc. An upstream proxy can be a full caching one, e.g. like Squid, perhaps the one at their ISP.
While working on one business idea, I stumbled upon a second which may be even better. It's in a market that grew a lot in the last 10 years and has become a cash cow for the companies involved. We'd create a product over about 9 months, which might cost about $600,000 to build and launch. My back-of-the-envelope calculations show about $4 million possible annual revenue, even in year 1.

Obviously I need to test these numbers a lot before they'd be credible to investors. (And figure out the rest of the strategy!) But in general, a lot of my business ideas fall into this category. My ideas usually have a relatively modest cost to build, become cash flow positive quickly, but aren't necessarily huge ideas that would have VC appeal.

Do typical "angel investors" only invest in pre-VC companies? Are there angels that are receptive to smaller companies projecting relatively quick cash returns?

If not angels, what type of investors should I be looking for?
Dude, you seriously need to hire a designer. It makes all the difference in the world. Bad design will make an excellent product flop, and yes, your site is badly designed.

I hired a good romanian designer on rentacoder for $160 and he gave me an excellent photoshop mockup. Hired another guy for $50 and he converted the the mockup into neat cross browser compatible html.

Do the same, because your design sucks. EVERYONE thinks they are good at user interfaces, in reality, about 1% of programmers do it properly. Why do you think so much software is so difficult to use?

Oh and by the way, EMPHASIZE how you are different from all the other photosharing sites. Make sure everyone knows about the picture story part of your app. Let them not think it's just a regular site like flickr.

And reduce your prices. You are way above current market prices with a worse product. I hope you've bloody got an excellent marketing team, otherwise you're in for some floundering.
What about the whole NLP thing that NEGATIVE injunctions are ignored by the unconscious/subconscious brain.

In other words, this directive really serves to state "Be Evil" at the deepest level of our core consciousness?
ie because of this phrase, Google has become associated with (the word) "Evil" in a way few others throughout history have (ie with the possible exception of Hitler et al)
I can confirm that Sam is indeed mostly metal. When he walks, you can hear his balls of steel clanking.
The Largest Rails Application Loses Ground To PHP Competitor Due to Frequent Outages
I'm not "living 2.0". I don't have a MySpace page, and I'm not subscribed to Flickr, Reddit, Digg, delicious, or even Slashdot. Heck, I don't even have a blog at the moment (something I do plan on changing).

I would like to think that we are not just behind the times. I am with you that it just feels like some things are better off on your own personal machines than to be out there for some faceless corporation (once they eventually get bought out) to do whatever they wish with. I do think that part of the 2.0 movement is somewhat permanent, but there are certainly other parts of it that are a passing fashion. If you don't feel like jumping into something, for whatever reason, I don't think you should feel out of touch. At least I don't...
I think this illustrates the huge importance of uptime, even for free services. On the internet there is (almost) always a choice and people will pick even a lesser competitor over you, if you can't keep your damn servers alive.
I'm not trying to knock on anyone's development platform of choice, but how can anyone expect unproven software to perform at the kind of scale that some of these web apps are being asked to perform at? Lisp is a rather old and finely tuned language, but in Ansi Common Lisp, Paul Graham even suggests re-writing frequently-run sections of code in C or assembler. If a highly-optimized language needs to be profiled and tuned, how can that be avoided with a language like Python or Ruby?

Of course, there are issues such as SQL queries and system/hardware configurations that come into effect as well. The point is this: at some point, when you are trying to grow a product to such a massive scale, you need to expend some energy on optimization. If you just continue growing things in the same way you built your initial prototype, you're doomed to failure.
Making The Switch From Twitter to Jaiku (ouch)
I think you're making the mistake of thinking just because they couldn't make Rails scale that no one could have. They probably have guys working on the problem that are early employees -- not necessarily the best of the best. That said, I don't really know too many details about who they have working on it.
"The brotherÂs advice is to try and look for opportunities where you bring all the value."

Is it possible to have more info. on this one ?
Advertising and Communities - Developing a Business Plan
I'll share with you the business plan for my startup.
There's a difference between optimization and reliability.

For instance, Erlang isn't the fastest thing out there, but you can make some extremely reliable systems with it.

I still think Rails is a winner because of how fast it lets you develop the application. Most of us will probably never see the massive popularity spike that something like twitter has. So, better to optimize for development time, and put code speed optimization off until it's necessary.
Sam is the best submitter of front page TechCrunch articles I have ever seen.
True...Optimizing for getting to that popularity level fast is the wise thing to do, and so the most productive tool to develop in is the best one.

But...there are major costs to a lack of reliability, and they can rear their head before you reach that level of popularity. If you're not able to stay up during that all important first crunch or slashdotting or digg...you won't ever make it to the sustained popularity and growth that requires scaling up. RoR does seem to have some problems with that.

Ruby is the slowest of the most popular scripting languages, by most measures. RoR is pathological with databases in some circumstances (not common cases, admittedly). And, from what I can tell most RoR stacks (Apache+fcgi, Mongrel, ngenix, Lighty, etc.) have one or more pretty serious flaws when scaling up.

I'd still consider using it, since it's so much damned fun to write Ruby code.
Why some people excel and others don't!
@nurall

Yes, good link. I don't agree with the other comment to your post, but that is not the point.

An important factor to take in account and that you didn't talk about is the cost of a try. Some can be cheap and some are expensive. The eralier one fails, the cheaper it is.

YC makes it all very cheap to increment your n. The selection process allows you to fail very early and thus with minimal cost. Some see their dreams fell in pieces. But they should see the positive side of it. They could have borrowed love money, spend it all and fail. Would mom and pop be able to see that the idea is bogus, would they be objective and honnest enough to recognize it, even to themselves ? I wouldn't bet on this.

I am just repeating in my words what PG said. I fully agree with his analysis and the YC combinator success confirms its validity. But apparently some people (like Jay) don't get it.

If I had the money, I would join YC as coinvestor. Not because there might be money to do out it. Just because it is usefull for these kids. There alot of smart kids out there that simply don't, and won't, have their chance. What a waste for them and for us all. I would do it as a long term investment with most probably no direct return for me. Maybe their first project will go nowhere, but the second, third our fourth may be the hit. Investing in these kids is doing something very usefull for them, for the added value they will bring to internet users, the economy, etc.

This startup news stand is also a really usefull thing and not only for people in SV. Thanks.
New Yahoo! Start Page goes live
TechCrunch said the new My Yahoo! personal page will go live today. I think it's awful; especially on a wide-screen monitor.
Dave.TV - putting ads into videos the second a product is mentioned
If somebody in the video says the word bread, for example, an ad shows up for a few seconds for Wonder Bread.
New "Caching" Startup offers 5TB high-speed RAM data storage as a network appliance
"Pricing for the appliance begins at $400,000. CACHEfx comes in 0.25TB, 0.5TB, and 1TB iterations, which can be added in building-block fashion to increase caching capacity on the fly."
$3 a month Loopt competitor for Sprint "Ulocate" raises M$11 VC
SUN 9:00 Video - Likes Twitter, "Our business goes stale as soon as product is released." "Is technology a competitive weapon, or a cost?"
"Teenagers have a higher chance of finding a buddy on the same street [via friend location software on their phone] than soldiers do."
Web 2.0: Find Mirrors And Caches Of Popular Digg News