skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder what this same conversation looks like in the suburbs of Connecticut, rural Kansas, or inner-city Chicago. I'm sure these SV kids are savvier than most (and richer), but this is still useful information.
Nothing like TechCrunch.
from my blog post: "An idea is a seed; many ideas have to be discovered and implemented along the way for it to grow up. The initial fertilisation is essential, but differentiation into organs, the "other ideas along the way" must come along."

this was the seed. even after differentiation into organs - as the Theory of Relativity, it was still an idea on paper. You cannot reasonably argue that it was worthless. Other people executed it.
I do agree. That's why I said "the way most people do it" and not all. When people talk about building a site through SEO they're almost always talking about those black-hat tricks. I'm all for the kind of SEO that Digg or Wikipedia does. I'm not suggesting you ignore SEO altogether. My point was that SEO is not a product in and of itself.
Google Tech Talk:  On Getting Creative Ideas
Buzz = free marketing :)
She got rid of them, apparently. Which is too bad; they're a great idea.
That's terrible in my book. What if you are running an entertainment site with lots of subdomains and for every single subdomain the user gets harassed with this question?

These certificates have nothing at all to do with "authority." Just think about it, what exactly do they prove?

Why should you only be allowed to speak in confidence with well identified parties (not that verisign remotely attempts to identify anyone)? Think carefully.

Related: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/new_phishing_tr.html
The Authority provides a way to check the address of a domain name holder and other useful information. It makes it a lot harder for someone to create a spoof domain like https://www.paypa1.com and for Paypal's real address to be displayed in the certificate when you click on it. Basically Verisign and co stake their reputation on checking the details of the certificate applicant.

I don't see what's terrible about browser makers trusting certain authorities. It's useful to the user, and there's more than one authority so less chance of abuse. The only alternative is no authorities, or a government bureaucracy issuing them. I don't see how either of those 2 options is superior to the current situation.

There's nothing stopping you creating a free Certification Authority, it's just that you'd have to persuade the browser makers to trust you.
'... burglar, a spy, a fugitive, a delinquent, a hacker, and a piano teacher ...'

CONDOR IN SNEAKERS: Staring & directed by Robert Redford as Bishop. Who leads a team of smart hackers who first work out the what, "make things people want" then ruthlessly executes the how. All the time, incremently adjusting the what. The focus, just work on making "black box" the best in the world and getting as many customers as possible. At the same time, outsmarting those who seek to take a shortcuts in hard road to startup success.

BISHOP: "Well here we have it gang. We know the deal, build the 'black box', release it early, incremental improvements and build up the customers."

MOTHER: "Come on 'Bishop' that theory has been well and truly debunked. Just last week in my latest edition of Conspiracy Theory, you know the Marketing edition. It says in black and white, 'the only way to get recognised' is a quick word to Crunch and your gold!."

WHISTLER: "Did you mean 'Capitan Crunch'? Did you know Crunch did prototype work for Apple ][ telephony hardware, but Jobs got it canned."

BISHOP: "No he means the 'Silicon Alley' of the Noughties. TechCrunch is a waste of time. Look these guys can't even scale their website, they don't listen to their customers. When the advertising falls they are history."

MOTHER: "You mean I've been reading this Marketing edition and it's not true? But they have influence right? Just one email to the editor, then BAMMM. Instant recognition. I simply don't believe you."

CREASE; "It wasn't Jobs, 'Whistler'. It was Gates. Don't worry we settled that one siphoning off his fortune to charity and planting logic bombs in Windows Vista. You don't think he's quiting Microsoft for the love of giving money away do you?"

BISHOP: "Crease enough pranks. Carl hows the new features going? Whistler whats the growth rate this week? Mother come, lets have a quick chat on your sources of information"

Some quick refs ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakers_(movie)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Days_of_the_Condor
First of all, this would have to be better than Google Reader for people to use it, and even then, people probably wouldn't switch. Secondly, Google already shows users the data about how often they read articles from each feed. If it turns out that ordering feeds by priority is a good interface idea (which I think it is if you have search as well), then all Google has to do is write a few lines of code and the feeds will be ordered automatically using the read frequency data.

The way you explain the idea makes it sound novel, but to users, all they'll see is that you'll be able to reorder the feeds instead of putting it in alphabetical order. The data would be useful for bloggers, but it has to be appealing enough for end users to use as well, or there won't be any data in the first place.
The SSL software in your web browser uses the information from the certificate authority to mathematically PROVE a man in the middle attack is NOT happening.

Anytime you use a self-signed certificate [edit] without manually verifying the fingerprint of certificate [/edit] ANYONE who controls the network hardware between you and the second party can eavesdrop and even tamper with the communication stream. Neither you nor the second party has any way of knowing what's going on. That's why we NEED a warning every time we encounter a self-signed certificate.

The default behavior of the browsers is fine and we're lucky that the design allows us to fool around with self-signed certificates at all.

EDIT: If you manually verify the fingerprint of the self-signed certificate each time you connect you can be sure your connection is secure. But still the UI makes sense (even more sense).
Is Ruby the dog and PHP the dogfood?
Good luck passing their technical test, they are crazy, borderline ridiculous.
Tempted, but I have no desire to move to SF.
I said what I said in that thread having already read this post and many others of his. His story is an SEO success story more than anything else. He has, I believe, largely transitioned from that being his primary source of traffic. His site is a social site, so of course at some point it becomes self-sustaining.

He's also not the most forthright guy, so he's not going to say "I'm an black-hat SEO guy who made millions". It doesn't sound as impressive. The MySpace guys were spammers. No one remembers or really cares how you get started, but it's important to know the truth if you want to accurately evaluate startup strategies.
If something is worthless because people will not give you money for it ("make something people want"), then there is nothing inherent in ideas that makes them worthless.

It is simply the fact that most people would not pay you for ideas that make them generally not a profitable endeavor.
ivan is probably referring to PG's insistence that startups should have multiple founders (preferrably two).
"""I don't see what's terrible about browser makers trusting certain authorities"""

Because the authorities trust anyone who pays them 20 bucks. THEN, the users trust any site where the address bar turns yellow. Do you see the break in the chain here?
Does he realize that he is reiterating the hierarchy he was mocking?

ignore - laugh - fight - win

He says ruby people are trying to skip the middle two steps... and then he laughs at them for it... heh. Also does a fair bit of fighting about it...
You're changing your argument, Your initial point was that encrypted HTTP should be free. It is.

Then you switched to say that you can't really trust Authorities. Maybe so, but the current setup seems better to me than the alternatives.
"""Anytime you use a self-signed certificate ANYONE who controls the network hardware between you and the second party can eavesdrop and even tamper with the communication stream. Neither you nor the second party has any way of knowing what's going on. That's why we NEED a warning every time we encounter a self-signed certificate."""

I believe that you misunderstand the technology.
One benefit of subdomains is that you can set cookies for each subdomain separately. For example, I can be logged in to my user1.example.com and user2.example.com both at the same time without having to logout and then login again.
Doesn't the browser warn you by default for self-signed certificates? If so your second paragraph is incorrect isn't? You would get a warning every time you encounter a self signed certificate.
It was just harder than any other technical test I've ever had. They asked things that not even the smartest people I know would have been able to answer on the spot (over the phone).
in the sense of esoteric knowledge, or the sense of difficult-to-figure-out?

Because the latter, ok, but the former, seems pretty retarded. I can always google esoteric questions.
Read Schneier's take on it that I linked to. He agrees that this false sense of positive identification can be WORSE than none at all. And that has to do with the warnings that the browser gives, not the matching up of the domain names.

Second, my argument has always been that the browser should not harass the user of a site that has not taken part in this PHONY identification procedure.

Heck, even google adsense has seen through this scam and not bothered to pay the fee.

Edit: To clarify, most users equivocate signed SSL certificate == trustable site. That is WRONG. Verisign does not vigorously establish the non-evilness of your site.

Example: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/02/the_new_face_of_phishing_1.html
Right, but it's completely out of your target market. To me, buzz means 'Oh, hey, they'll never actually use it, but it looks cool'
It required me to go look up the Poisson distribution in my stats book.
ooh. yeah that definitely comes under the esoteric category.
Steve Rubel from micropersuasion.com will disagree with you :) Few marketing keywords: meme and word of mouth
Suggest founders for new edition of 'Founders at work'
Reading Founders at Work and going through the stories I was struck by who was not in the list. Another edition is in the planning by JL. What founders would you suggest for the second edition? Mine would be ...

- Donna Dubinsky, Jeff Hawkins (Ed Colligan) ~ Palm Computing

- CmdrTaco ~ Slashdot

- Larry Ellison ~ Oracle

- Hasso Platner ~ SAP

- David Kelly ~ IDEO

- John Carmack ~ Id Software

- Peter Molyneux ~ Bullfrog, Lionshead
I'm mostly interested in hearing from hardware and finance guys. However, the first obvious interview would be:

- Larry & Sergey

- Astro Teller @ Body Media

- Matt Flannery @ Kiva

- Ross Freeman, Bernie Vonderschmitt, and Jim Barnett @ Xilinx
K, I was just confused about the story. I think I even recall the POF guy saying that SEO is totally useless for dating sites. Who knows.
Did you have to pitch your startup to them? How many tries did it take before Techcrunch feature you?
Reading his blog for a long time I've learned he's extremely paranoid and highly competitive. So I listen very intently but always question his motives. On the one hand he wants to brag, but he also doesn't want to help the competition. It makes for interesting reading.
Good suggestions. Haven't we all had enough of Molyneux, though? Plus, who out there is starting a game company? Nobody. Maybe Nolan Bushnell would be interesting, though.

I have a few suggestions of my own:

- Jeremy Wertheimer (ITA)

- Justin Frankel (Nullsoft)

- Lars Rasmussen (Where2)

- Jawed Karim (YouTube)

- Wil Shipley (Delicious Monster)

Longshots: Bill Joy, Larry or Sergey, Marc Andreessen, Pierre Omidyar
++++ Brad Fitzpatrick / LiveJournal

++++ Joe Kraus / JotSpot (not Excite)

+++ Chad Hurley or Steve Chen / YouTube

+++ Reid Hoffman / LinkedIn

+++ Jason Calacanis / Weblogsinc

++ Markus Frind / PlentyOfFish

++ Kevin Rose / Digg

++ Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook

+ Michael Arrington / TechCrunch
This has been around before, there were some listed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16901

Personally, I find the "big, but not huge" ones the most inspirational for some reason. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the like have been covered a lot in various ways, and have also had time to let their legends grow in their own minds.
For me it's Scholastic News and Nick.com.

(In other words: shouldn't this depend on your product and your target market?!? Or is everyone just building generic Web 2.0 apps that only appeal to alpha geeks?)
Ben Nolan ~ Groupswiki.com
Precisely - the difference is between "worthless", which we instinctively know isn't true, and "won't pay money for":

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/04/26/ideas-are-worthless

In short: for practical purposes, PG is right, but wrong in his theory.
the job ad says they are looking for someone to develop fraud-detection algorithms. the poisson distribution is not esoteric in that context.
Richard Barton of Zillow
Jack Dangermond of ESRI

Also would like to see a gaming founder - Carmack is a fine candidate &
-Jason Rubin & Andy Gavin formerly of Naughty Dog & currently with/founded Flektor
Comodo and other SSL providers will give you free certs that don't cause any warnings. But, they only last 3 months instead of 1 year.
Nginx + Swiftiply + Mongrel: Best way to deploy serious Rails apps
paul graham / Teenwag
I'm clearly out of the loop. I've never heard of any of those except Larry and Sergey. They definitely aren't the "first obvious" choices for me. ;-)
Politicians weigh renewal of Net access tax ban
Exactly, I'm referring to that claim :)
Personally, I put these lines in my ~/.inputrc. It allows the vi
key-bindings to still work but a few of the non-vi ones can leak
through.

set keymap vi-insert

C-p: previous-history

C-n: next-history

C-b: backward-char

C-f: forward-char

C-a: beginning-of-line

C-e: end-of-line

C-l: clear-screen
Is it really necessary to work 70-80 hour weeks? How long do they want to keep it up?

What is the rationale behind long work hours?
Google announces purge of ad-heavy sites
Why PG was not right on co-founders or two points of view.
You can run your business alone and you can be successful. There is no reason why this can't happen. Just from VC's point of view it's disadvantage.

Why? Say you created successful online web service. Alone. Than, accidentally (ex. caterpillar behind the next corner) something fatal happen to you. Who will care about running business. Do you think that by ex. PG has appetite to search for new business owner and maintainer? It's not possible to simply jump in the running train if you know nothing about business internals and by Murphy's law one day after your death application stops working due some old, forgotten bugs. Take any Y sponsored site and ask PG what he knows about its source code. This is IMHO the only reason why VC's encourage you to find a co-founder. I'm running my sites alone and still have not a feeling of burn-out :) If you don't have enough skills to implement your idea, employ someone, if you don't have enough time to work on business, employ someone.

Now think about it. If your online business idea is something what cure your customers' pain, you don't need VC's capital to be sucessful. We are living in age of blogs and other wonderful viral marketing tools. Cheap hardware and hosting. Everything what you need is courage, kind community and forget arrogance.

I don't want to say that have a co-founder is bad thing. I just want to say that this must have reason and that reason should not be the VC's opinion.

BTW: find a dependable co-founder is like find a needle in hay stack :)
Look Juwo, you're still playing with words. It's not so much that an idea is WORTHLESS (where it doesn't have any value) as it's that an idea doesn't really count for anything UNTIL it's been brought out into the real world. For all intents and purposes, Einstein's ideas were worthless until he put them down on paper.

Let me phrase this another way: what if Einstein had never written The Theory of Relativity? Would his ideas still be worth anything just sitting there in his brain?

Also, PG never wrote that ideas were "worthless". He wrote that people "overvalue ideas". This is what I mean when I say you're playing with words. Changing "overvalue ideas" to worthless frames it very differently and isn't very precise.
I don't know... I think the statistics are pretty favorable to having a co-founder. This isn't just something PG invented. People have been saying this for years.

BTW, I'm saying this as someone who is going it alone, even though it makes things riskier.
davidw is right.

p(success | more than 1 founder) is higher than p(success | only 1 founder)
Why getting acquired sucks by Steve Gedikian of Nullsoft
Yep, Carmack would be great; on the other hand, you can learn pretty much everything you need to know about how he started id Software with his friends by reading the great book "Masters of Doom" (I strongly recommend it).

George Broussard and the Duke Nukem team would be great, too (the brilliant guy who wrote the then-ubercool 3D game engine was still a kid at the time!)

By the way: web startups are great but they aren't the only ones. "Founders at work" is a great, great resource but it would have been even greater if it focused a little less on web stuff.

A very brilliant guy is Matt Dillon. Not the actor... well, he certainly is brilliant too ;) The software developer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon_(computer_scientist)

He started a few startups but he is mostly known as a BSD kernel developer wizard. He started the very innovative DragonflyBSD project (a fork of FreeBSD with impressive goals).

Chuck Moore (inventor of Forth and computer visionary) started/was part of a few startups, too. Lately, he has been with IntellaSys creating an impressive, radically-different microprocessor ("SEAforth").

The story of Bill Joy (BSD, TCP/IP hacker and co-founder of Sun Microsystems) would be cool, too.

The Lisp Machine guys would be great as well (though there already is some info available of the net).

And why not founders in fields not related at all with computers? The founders of Bose, Hobie Cat, etc.

EDIT: yes, there is a lot of superlatives :)
Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank would be great. He started a microfinance bank and recently won a Nobel Peace prize for his work! That's not something many startups can claim. Possibly Iqbal Quadir of Grameen Phone too.

Also some European startups such as skype, last.fm, moo etc
The article's domain displayed in parenthesis afterwards has an occasional leading period, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=24263 and .brainspl.at.
"Plus, who out there is starting a game company?"

The target audience for "Founders at work" is not just news.YC ;)
"I think the statistics are pretty favorable to having a co-founder"

It's all in the details. Let's say we have the same success rate for single founder and multiple founders ventures. There are many more multiple founders startups for at least two reasons: (1) it takes some guts to go alone and (2) VC/angels won't fund solo undertakings. Since the multiple founders pool is bigger, there are more successfull startups of this kind. Here you've got your misleading statistics.
Fucked Facebook
bunch of losers. get a life.
Adsense For Video, Google Still Lagging
It's timely, read in the WSJ that they're launching their platform today
facebook are in danger of letting their arrogance get in the way of good judgment
google knows all
thanks for the note kevin!
this is going to be awesome!
It's entirely relevant, and not entirely untrue. With the "platform" launching there will likely be dozens or hundreds of young companies building tools that work with Facebook. If Facebook eats all profitable niches (as they seem more than willing to do, as shown by the low-hanging fruit of classifieds), even if "partners" are living in them, there will be no room left for those young companies.

I'd steer well clear of building anything that I expected to make money on for Facebook.
facebook are your typical young, successful startup - arrogant to a fault. doesn't help that zuck is a harvard kid.
Depends on your definition of successful. If you want to build a website which accrues large amounts of advertising revenue - sure what marcus frind has done can be considered amazing.

Even making a 100th of what he does (maybe even a 1000th) would be enough for one person. Guess what - this happens everyday on the internet.

If you want to build a google, a microsoft, a paypal or something bigger its going to be hard for one person. From the investors perspective they want companies to generate a lasting difference to people's lives. Doing that as a one man band is hard. Generating monetary value for yourself is the flipside to this. But then who needs investors.

Ivan i disagree with you.
New Google Analytics Plagued with Problems
You know you've arrived when someone takes the time and effort to create a "fucked(your company)" site.
No problem I give a point to you and Who really needs investors could be next question here to discuss.
"How would a market for ideas work, in any case? How could you prevent someone from listening to a bunch of ideas and just walking away with the ones they like?"
-- your blog post

Secrecy and contracts?
Which makes the transaction costs higher than the idea is probably worth. Execution is very important, and in an ideas market, there would probably also be a lot of crappy ones. So, you have to sign a bunch of NDA like contracts, risk being sued if you ever develop anything like the things you may have seen, and probably also have to wade through a lot of junk.

While it might be sort of doable, it's probably not worth it until we have a magic pill that lets you forget the last 5 minutes of your life completely and totally.
QueensSpeech.com - social publishing network launches
Kraus is in the current edition. I'd have to agree with Fitzpatrick. I know your thoughts on his brilliance. Didn't think of Hurley/Chen. For Calacanis I'd also add Dave Winer. Rose, Zuckerberg are still playing out. What did Arrington do thats so interesting with TechCrunch?
'... George Broussard ...'

and the making of Duke Nukem Forever ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_Forever
I got several visits from a custom writeboard at writeboard.com. What's going on?
'... This has been around before ...'

I missed this and would have searched for it if I could have :( The ones I want are the side players as well There's lots of interesting going on in the pre PC, PC era, Web 1 & Web 2 era that have yet to be told.

- PC ~ Phil Kahn, borland

- Web 1 ~ realmedia

- Web 2 ~ moo, last.fm, zoomer, photobucket
1. They are working on clone of my site.
2. They are working on article about my site.
3. None of above.
I have no qualms about people creating cash generative websites either. Especially when young - the limiting factor to how ambitious your idea is is always capital.

Creating a cash-generative site and then selling it - or keeping it on the side to supplement building other ventures in the future is a great option. I'm very much thining about this right now.
"Which makes the transaction costs higher than the idea is probably worth."

These costs could surely be lowered if there was demand for ideas in the first place.

I think this is more evidence that ideas by themselves are generally worthless.
No one executed the theory of relativity.

This debate is silly.