skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want to take a stab on solving the parallax between what the blog author writes (which I love) and pg's comment above (which I also love.)

Most YCombinator founders (and YNews readers) are young, and venture capitalists or techcrunch readers know this. Every ounce in any skill set that shows we are competent helps sell us. Anything, be it as little as a great visual prototype, helps.

On the other hand, this article discusses how the non-silicon valley customers, managers, and investors (even Microsoft) will confuse images with reality. An even bigger problem is that the author assumes all programmers will be using a desktop programming language (with no frameworks) in most articles I've seen on that web site, not realizing that web frameworks allow anybody to have something up and running within a week. I think this advice would be more true pre-Ycombinator and pre-web framework days (in 2004.)

I trust that both observations are genuine; and, on a personal note, I prefer pg's attitude more, because I like hearing when people denounce or offer alternatives to "plan for the lowest denominator no matter what" type of business blog advice.
This is exactly why you don't move out to Silicon Valley. Build your start-up, get out, and enjoy your life. You might even have something left to give to charity.

In Silicon Valley you'll blow your money on a huge house, a plastic wife, and kids who want a BMW the moment they can drive. Oh, and don't forget the taxes.
Well, how is your model different from my.mp3.com? As you might recall, they did a website where you could upload your own music and play it from any Internet computer, but were sued and eventually settled for $200m.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#My.MP3.com
Do a back-of-the-envelope calculation for how much it would cost to do something to an extreme:
- constant tour of the world
- ultimate gaming setup
- beach bum in the tropics.

Then figure out how much you'd have to work to achieve it. In most cases, it takes less than a full-time median wage 52 . 40 . 16, meaning I could do them working far less than full-time.

"making it" is a state of mind. As is striving to reach an amorphous goal. Happiness research is perhaps some of the most useless work in economics because self reporting is so iffy.

If people don't feel rich, it has nothing to do with their absolute level of material comfort. Almost everyone alive today is far more rich than all other humans that have ever lived.
A BBC article that didn't mention auctomatic? :o
It would be nice if desktop apps could be write-once, run everyowhere important -- like web apps kinda are. Easy client-server communication on a desktop app for persistence between computers would also be nice.

There is something to be said for really peppy interfaces, rich input mechanisms (multi-touch, joysticks, gestures through a webcam), and compiled graphics libraries that blow our minds.

There is probably room for an open source system that uses a good languages, provides these capabilities, and could run everywhere. A model where monetization comes from support could probably work.

Something like QT is clearly not there yet. Doesn't actually run everywhere and C++ stinks.
Maybe you're not looking at/for the right people? Maybe, if the people you think are good but who join companies and give up startup dreams, or go back to school after doing YCombinator, then it means that you didn't choose the right people to run a startup for more than one year into the future? Maybe they thought it was a way to fill the summer and pad their resume?

It's also remarkable how founding people over and over again who may not have ever read or followed any startup advice you've given but who have the same educational background as you or read both of your Lisp books, turns founders into tame animals...

It's tough to say it, but it's tough not to say it...
Seems to me, people are either of the kind that's happy as long as they have a cold beer and someone to share it with, or the kind that will always be sufficiently unhappy with what they have to bust their ass in pursuit of more.

I suspect Silicon Valley, like New York, is home to an over abundance of the latter kind. While at the same time, those who can't understand continuing to work like that despite having millions, are exactly those that would never have bothered putting in the effort to get millions in the first place.
>Too me it looks like analytical people are scared by complexity of stuff, while intuitive people like it.

It seems more likely that analytical people are aware of complexity of stuff, while non-analytical people are not.
Why not let online ads fight it out in a geometric real-time game played by advertisers and consumers?
The advertiser may display his/her ad along with all the other ads currently on display.

Larger ads have the disadvantage that they will overlap with other ads and may end up underneath many of them.

Advertisers may resize and/or move their ads at any time to reduce overlap.

Whenever two ads overlap, they will then have to fight it out to see which one will go on top. This fight is on-going and may involve one ad appearing on top, later underneath, then on top again, and so on.

To determine which of two overlapping ads goes on top, we would compare their current scores, where the score of an ad could be the number of visits minus the number of "hide" requests from consumers say.
I would have thought it would be just the opposite. Going to school drives me bonkers. By the end of the quarter, I can't wait to stop being taught all this garbage and get back to my own studies/projects. I presume you're talking about people who feel the same way. What's so different about employment?
nreece, thanks for the advice! Could you recommend any other sites besides web2.0forsale.com and sitepoint.com?
Essentially, this is a geometric version of social news where some links may stay on the front page a long time simply because they are taking comparatively little screen real estate and people don't mind having them there. Other links may take up more screen real estate and stay on the front page for long periods of time because many people deem them as important. In this version of social news, the submitter of a link would be always adjusting the size and/location of the link graphical representation.
Plucky Little MyNumo Cranks Out the Best iPhone Games
The venture capital community is kicking itself for missing out on this talented team.
MP3.com stored all the music online. You gained access to a CD MP3.com had ripped by proving you owned the CD. There was no uploading involved.

The question is whether Anywhere.fm has a responsibility to police their network for illegal MP3s. It's logistically impossible to do so, but that doesn't mean the courts won't come down hard on them if they are successful.
eBay!

Also checkout DNForum.com, NamePros.com, GeekVillage.com forums etc.
That's probably not a very good thing to pursue. People who feel important on account of their shoes do so out of stupidity. Capitalizing on people's stupidity is generally unfulfilling, and the success is hard to predict, because you can't relate to your customers. And why bother, when you can instead create something genuinely useful, for smart people and idiots alike?
This has never been my experience. If your managers can't believe you when you say the gloss is just good design and not a sign of completeness, get a new manager.

If your manager doesn't understand anything about infrastructure, and reacts to a poor interface with talk of program cancellation, get a new manager.
When To Dump That Great Idea: http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/06/apple-amazon-myspace-ent-ma...
An abject lesson in unchecked desire.
Yes, somebody can just upvote 10 random things to get 10 negative 'credits.'

How are they going to use all 10 on one article? Both arrows disappear after the first vote. And, the old articles can't be voted down any more. Finally, if the person decides to wait for somebody to post 9 more comments over the next 2 weeks or however frequently the user posts (so they can downvote them) the comment will still be current and the rest of the YC community will vote up the comment back to a positive number. It seems like a good solution to me.
Rich, for me, is changing the world.

If you gave me 10M tomorrow, I would still work my ass off to someday become rich.

I would hate to be enslaved by my money because I'm supposed to be relaxing just because I have a certain amount of it.
Reminds me of Gary Player's quip, in response to the suggestion that he was a particularly lucky golfer, "the harder you practice, the luckier you get."
From http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=80815 :

"id Software has set up a second development team - and its first project is likely to raise some eyebrows.

"That group has begun by working on a web-browser-based version of the developer's popular Quake 3 Arena first-person shooter, Quake Zero, which will be funded by advertising."
A fair point, but there is a downvote threshold (20 points). Easy to overcome, but also easy to detect.
Is there value in karma-neutral interaction? Perhaps some users are better at up-voting and some better at down-voting.
Dot-com Ebituaries. Will history repeat itself?
I know a guy like that. His take on it is that it's a combination of social pressure and families: families are often more expensive than any of ivankirigin's doing things to extremes, and they get more expensive as you put them in richer peer groups. I suspect that if you were single, being worth $10 million would sit with you just fine, even if you wanted to do extravagant things.

(Not that that would make me choose to be single, though.)
Who was your Childhood Inspiration?
Personally, I was never more motivated to learn about computers than when I would look through Kim Schmitz's (aka Kimble) photo galleries online. I think anyone who visited that site as a pubescent boy will understand what I'm talking about.

For those of you who don't remember him, Kimble was a flamboyant, very (temporarily) wealthy, German hacker whose life consisted of buying exotic cars, hanging out with models, and traveling all over the world. Also, um, there was something about insider trading (but that's hardly inspirational).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz

Who inspired you to focus on technology/startups?
Seems like there are more efficient ways to determine the effectiveness of an ad.
Why You Shouldn't Ignore Amazon's New FPS
Easy way to use micro-payments to your advantage. FPS is definitely opening some doors, allowing users to charge as little as 1 cent without issue. I already have a laundry list of ways I can use FPS and simple web services with micro-payments. What do you guys think of FPS?
But would something like this attract traffic simply because it is different?
If that were the case, you'd lose your competitive advantage as soon as someone clones your service.
Wow! We're about to launch our Facebook app as well...
http://www.litepost.com
http://mail.litepost.com
You'd essentially be motivated to seek poor returns for a campaign. How would that create value for the advertiser?
Do we need, and does the web want, a new reddit-like site?
I've considered making a new reddit style site, incorporating a variety of improvements (probably like many readers here). Is there strong demand for such a service? How hard would it be to replicate the strong and thoughtful community reddit initially created today?
The advertiser would be motivated to create better ads and target them well.
I think you can effectively fake the appearance of community in the beginning, assuming you have the resources.

A more important question is: how would you create value for a potential user beyond what the existing communities offer?
Brick-and-mortars aren't good at targeting internet users -- that's precisely why Google does so well.

Most companies would much rather outsource this task since it's very rarely close to their core competencies.
Judging from the comments, PG is considering launching one, so I don't know if you'd want to be in direct competition with him. But it'd be an interesting fight.

It seems there will always be demand for clusters of intelligent people. If you can cater to that, go for it!
Hence my maniacal obsession to escape from one.
Bill Gates :)
Can you please refer me to some comments which highlight PG's intention on launching such a site?
The facebook video is pretty good too.
Kaizen is the concept of continuous and neverending improvement. In Japan it stems from W. Edwards Deming's principles of statistical process and quality control imported from America in the 1950s as part of Japan's post-WWII reconstruction efforts in the manufacturing sector.

Its citation here is virtually tautological: the tool to improve productivity is Kaizen, which means improving continuously! How stupendously helpful.

"Think, rethink and attempt Kaizen, with 100 per cent clarity and understanding;"

Apparently all you need to get to 100 percent clarity and understanding on a fuzzy concept is a bulleted list instructing you to do so. Enlightenment, here I come.
Does an NDA make sense for outsourced developers during startup?
I'm starting a startup, and I'm considering the option of outsourcing parts of the prototype development. I'd be interested in the opinion of everyone here on the following:

1. What is your opinion about outsourcing initial prototype work in the first place?
2. To what extent do you think an NDA for outsourced developers is effective in protecting the 'idea'?
3. If this happens to be a not-so uncommon occurrence, I'd appreciate pointers in the direction of a generic NDA pertaining to this particular circumstance.

Thanks.
Some people are motivated by what money can buy others are motivated by the freedom it can bring. Someone motivated by freedom will put in just as good an effort as someone motivated by material wealth. The bottom line is that you are motivated.
Someone submitted a question asking PG what philosophy books he recommended.

He answered the question and killed the thread... I said that he should spin off an off-topic part of the site, and he said that he was seriously considering launching it on a separate domain.

I can't find it with any of the searches because it was marked dead...
I need at least 10 million for my daughters sweet sixteen MTV birthday party. If her party is not better than the other boys and girls parties than she won't love me anymore : (
broke 150k one day later... this will be interesting... :).
The word is "infringement."
It's not just a division between people who are happy with some amount of money and people who always want more. There are also people who are unsatisfied because they have a constant need to create things. I believe most of the really driven people in Silicon Valley are of this type, actually.
Here's one. The goal would be to make a site that would never become super popular, but just have the kind of people who used reddit in the first year.

It wouldn't make sense for a startup to deliberately make something that wasn't meant to be popular. For something like this to exist it has to be done by someone doing it as a hobby.
Hmm, let me think about the primary apps people around my office use when they want to get work done (instead of goofing off on the web). Artists: Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Coders: Visual Studio, Eclipse, Emacs, etc. Project Managers: MS Project, Requisite Pro, JIRA, etc. Business/Marketing: Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.

Only one non-desktop app in the mix there - that being JIRA. Looks like the death knell was a tad premature once again.
"Stay tuned for a series on the strategies employed by the self-made to become billionaires."

Apparently one way is to advertise something you can't actually deliver yet. It worked for Microsoft, and apparently this blog is adopting the vaporware strategy as well.

It's also simultaneously an example of anything with "smart" in the name not living up to the claim, and anything with "startup" in the name not actually being helpful to start-ups.
School tends to make you tame too, but in different ways. What you get in big companies that's missing in schools is politics. You can generally do a class project on anything you want. But to get something launched within a big company takes a superhuman effort. After a while, hackers lose their desire to.
what about if you want to create good children? 60 hour startup work weeks can't be good for that, can they?
Well, it's stories like these that make us pause and reflect that we are lucky not to have such troubles.
Some people are just more determined than others. Believe me, I wish we were better at recognizing the determined ones. It's not for lack of trying. But determination, like courage, is hard to predict. Some quiet people turn out to be very determined, and some people who talk big give up easily.
Quick Survey: How would you prefer to fund an account?
This was my first Wufoo form. I'm amazed.

Like I say in the form, I'm trying to figure out what to use, and gauge response to new options.
If you actually look at how people use email you will find quite a bit of diversity. However, one of the common threads in email usage is task management. This highlights one of the biggest areas of deficiency in Gmail. Take the lack of calendar integration as one example.
When you're at school, you have a time limit. No matter how soulsucking it is, you know that if you wait a semester, you'll have vacation all to yourself. And if you wait 4 years, you'll have a degree and can do whatever you want.

Cognitive dissonance is bearable for short periods. It's excruciatingly mindwracking when it persists over an open-ended time period with no end in sight. If you're a technical employee at most software firms, you will eventually find yourself in a situation where you have to obey a technical decision that you know is wrong. Your options then are:

1. Don't, and get fired.

2. Convince yourself that the decision in question really is good. This explains many Java programmers, actually.

3. Accept that the decision sucks, but that you often have to go along with sucky decisions for the sake of the team. This is how good programmers un-learn independence.

Many people face this dilemma early on in their school career, probably back when the teacher first assigns busywork (which is now in what, 3rd grade?). I'd estimate that 90-95% un-learn independence before graduating high school. A few people make it through high school and college as rebels and underachievers - they never quite buy into "This is pointless, but I have to do it anyway." Most will change their mind after getting a job - after all, most jobs really aren't that bad if you're not in a perpetual power struggle with your boss.
You can't "create" good children. They'll resent it when you care more about their life than they do.

I suspect people who work 60 hour workweeks have a tougher time supporting their children (emotionally, not financially), but stay-at-home parents also have trouble setting examples for their kids. It's all a tradeoff.
It's an excellent idea Paul. Reddit and Digg have become polluted. A fresh, simple, laid-back approach will surely be worth daily reading among a small group of followers.
That is definitely true, and probably a big differentiator between Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In Silicon Valley, there are those who are rich 'accidentally', simply as a side effect of doing something they really wanted to do. You see the same in the entertainment business, as well as in 'leisure' industries, like mountain bike and surf board building.

Once you go beyond these 'legends', to the, I believe, much larger group of people described in the article, this no longer seems to hold, though. The "legends'" possibly inadvertent, yet widely publicized, financial success, seems to have drawn to The Valley many more that ARE in it for the money, and these are the ones I doubt will ever be content.
A PollDaddy.com poll would have been a better choice.
We don't choose our peers so much. I just read an article about people who make more than I do -- I've never met them. Peers is used here in a broad sense. It isn't your close group of friends, which you do choose (somewhat :P)
Yet another variant on reddit:  Submitter determines and can change rank of link on front page
The idea here is that the submitter determines the rank of his/her link. Moreover, the submitter may change this rank at any time.

The issue is that a link ranked highly will have to share that rank with many links. The probability that a user will see a link at rank k depends on the score of that link with respect to the scores of other links with rank k.
Have them sign an NDA, and only disclose on a need-to-know basis. For example don't disclose information about unrelated business processes or complex modules. If you are new to outsourcing or you haven't worked with the outsourcing team before, it's always better to outsource only the less complicated and low risk functionality to start with.

I'd rather hire a reputed techie or small team at RentACoder.com Or oDesk.com. They take care of payment escrow and NDA's etc.
Keep Your Second Round of Financing in Mind
Aka meta-ranking. Digg already does this transparently by asserting the links initial rank based on the popularity of the users past submissions. But I get your point on having a truely democratic user-driven ranking system.
Here it is: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30048

Found by taking the text from the copy of Paul's response to the question that he put on his RAQ page and googling it.
Among people there are directed and mostly acyclic graphs of deference to greater knowledge of various topics. E.g. my girlfriend would ask me about math questions, and I'd ask friends who'd been math majors, who in turn might ask specialists in some subfield. Weight people's votes on a topic by their position in the graph.
And here I was, happy to have health insurance and enough to pay rent.

If only I were unhappy with millions of dollars.
Is that running as a Java applet?

If so, that's just a testament to the fact that the JVM has become fairly decent in the last several years.
Better to offend some than to bore everyone.
Dayum, no wonder some of these venture guys want to see a 'business guy' on board. I somehow doubt I could get a check out of this one if he asked about my Revenue Recognition Policy, and I answered: Uhh! Dude! Wanna check out some really cool hofs I wrote last night? :)

On a more serious note, if one actually plans on making a living off of a software startup, without betting on simply getting acquired at a crazy valuation; at some point I guess figuring out at least roughly where the money will come from does become a bit of a necessity. Even if that means accepting revenue, at least partially, being a function of number of sales guys.:(
Resources for Submitting to Social Networking News Sites
Some resources for those starting out as social news networking submitters.
I am VERY excited by this!

I'm surprised people aren't amazed by the oppurtunities the micropayments open up and secondly, the fact that amazon already has 70mil customers ready to use FPS!
In our UI class we were taught that if it is a prototype, that it should look like a prototype.

The concern was that if you over-do the UI to make it seem in between a prototype and a finished product, then you are confusing yourself and others judging the design whether to take this as a finished product or a prototype.

That makes sense. If I want a critique of my application's layout, then giving colors to buttons isn't a good idea since I just want feedback on the layout. The colors are just a distraction.
Good point. We've already taken measures to ensure that:

1. Define a specific audience (business geeks)

2. Weight different users differently (so new users don't have the same authority as the regulars)
augy, I think your DNS mistakenly re-route you to news.ycombinator.com instead of Slashdot.com
Are VCs inherently evil?