skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was exactly what we tried a year ago (mobile-based ridesharing).

It did not work for us because:

1) Hard to get traction due to the classic chicken-and-egg problem: Ride sharers do not sign-up due to the lack of riders, and riders do not sign-up due to the lack of sharers.

2) People do not trust on anonymous riders. We hoped to solve this issue by introducing a social network where we would prioritize the matches by degrees of separation. But that didn't work due to #1

3) The large majority of the population enjoy their privacy in their own car and do not have a motivation to share the ride (perhaps when gas prices get higher)

4) For those who are motivated enough to share a ride, there are plenty of options available out there: Craigslist, employer's bulletin board, in additional to local authorities (ex: 511.org and casual car pooling in Bay Area)

Seems like this one (web based, not mobile) got some traction: http://www.ridester.com/
In what context does it cut development time?
Facebook doesn't have an automated test suite. I wouldn't call that a simplistic app.
I like that as well
Are web 2.0 and sound software engineering practices incompatible?
It seems to me that web 2.0 is essentially a race. The faster you get your service launched -- no matter how buggy -- the better your chances.

Consider for example the importance of getting your facebook app out as quickly as possible.

In such an environment, you might expect many good software engineering practices (e.g., unit test cases) to go out the window.
The larger your units the more important unit testing is. Now replace larger with smaller and more with less.
No; in fact the phrase "Web 2.0" is popular with much the same people as the phrase "software engineering."
Slide is #1 in widgets (RockYou #2)
For anyone who asks why you would give away X% of your company to YC - this is the answer. To be a part of that kind of network.
Maybe so, but I don't see how this implies that sound software engineering practices are compatible with web 2.0 startups.
In web space most of software has already been engineered and put up online for you to grab for free: just plug in your database, stick your own queries and skin it with your own CSS.
Sun supper offer appeals to Torvalds (Linux + Solaris?)
eBay pins global e-commerce push on Skype and PayPal
I second that. Once you've launched, your product is usually fairly stable (in terms of domain, big features, etc) and the tests are worth it for confidence in smaller changes/maintenance. Before then, your code base changes so often that updating the tests start dragging down your productivity.
eBay in patent fight over 'Buy It Now'
Day without Google fails to impress (AltSearchEngine day challenge users to not use big 5 search engines)
Your own online office (choice of available tools)
Implicit web (the things we pay attention to, amazon, google & attentiontrust)
"What the lack of socialized health care in the United States means is that instead of the government paying a little bit for preventative and maintenance care, the government pays a lot as elderly and poor people who have lived a life with no preventative or maintenance care need expensive prescriptions and expensive treatments."

What preventative and maintenance care exactly? I've lived in countries with (mostly) socialized health care all my life and I'm not noticing any government run preventative and maintenance care really.

Did you make the above up or do you have some links to it?
You sound like you've looked at a lot of packages...Is there a good roundup anywhere?

Still looking for a network that will let me as a publisher pass keywords at load-time on a per-user basis, to serve contextual ads on a dynamic site, based on user-generated content...
We all know VCs worship at the altar of the huge liquidity event, so it's no surprise to hear one speak of cashing out as utter blasphemy. But finger-wagging about "how it's done" and how "everybody benefits" is excess protestation, especially considering the Facebook counterexample.

Investors have to look after their stake and so does every other shareholder. It's not a moral issue whether a VC gets founders to take a Warren Buffett never-cash-out vow or lets them take pre-liquidity money. It's a strategic, market-driven business arrangement made by people whom are accountable to the company's shareholders. If I was Ron, I would try harder to look at "paying off" as an opportunity even if I dismissed it in interviews. I hope he's doing that!
Canada gets poor grade for failing to innovate
What javascript framework do you use?
If you don't trust Facebook, then build a Facebook app with limited functionality to promote your full-featured service outside Facebook.
I agree. The most valuable thing, out of a wide array of valuable things, for us turned out to be the other founders. I can point to a dozen new features in our product that came from discussions at YC dinners (Ruby Gems module, mobile access, multiple usability enhancements, EC2 support, S3 support, and on and on).

Our new website (launching soonish) turned out vastly better than it would have been without the feedback of guys like Kevin Hale of Wufoo and Evan from SocialMoth/Overhear.us (and some anonymous YC'ers on Overhear.us who took a look at it during various stages of development and gave us some pointers).
I've been using Prototype/script.aculo.us for a over a year now, and have found it pretty good. I've also just started using JQuery, and found that to be really cool, much more fun than Prototype. Please post what js framework you use and why. Thanks.
Just posted part 2:
http://fourstarters.com/2007/06/14/all-transactions-are-based-on-trust-part-2/
Well, I think auctomatic.com, a graduate of their Winter Program, was started by two business guys. Also, Sam Odio got an internship at Anybots this summer, and he's a business guy. Finally, the last user who posted a job offer on YC News was also a business guy.
"Without automatic testing dynamic languages are not very productive because they do not catch type mismatch errors during compilation time (there isn't one). With statically typed languages you get a lot of tiny issues taken care of once you hit magic "compile" button and compiler does some basic sanity checks."

You're just exhibiting a basic dislike of dynamic languages. Type mismatch errors are mostly orthogonal to testing.

"Without solid unit tests backing you, activities like removing "obsolete" methods or renaming classes/modules turn into nightmare with duck typed languages."

This is a nightmare regardless of typing. If you remove a method that is still used somewhere, you've broken something, and you may not spot it until after it ships to customers. It doesn't matter whether you have type checks or not. A compiled language that links in those classes and methods at compile time does resolve this issue, but it's not related to types (and you have to wait on the bloody thing to compile every time you change one character in the file). Testing does resolve this problem--but it's not a problem specific to dynamic languages.

If you get a warm fuzzy feeling from type checking from your compiler, then by all means, enjoy it. But there are tools for most mature dynamic languages (Perl and Python for example) that will do that checking without having to write tests manually. But, having never found type errors to be a problem in my Perl or Python code, I've never used them. Some problem sets are more prone to type mismatch bugs than others, and I guess my areas of interest are among the ones that are rarely effected.
Paul Gram, his following, and the hacker partiality
I would like to debate Paul Gram's partiality towards hackers and whether or not this has a negative effect on creativity.

I will open the debate by arguing that being partial to a specific group of people, in this case hackers, does limit creativity. In Paul Gram's essay 'The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups' he says

"when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it. That's actually much harder than it sounds--almost impossibly hard in fact--because business guys can't tell which are the good programmers. They don't even get a shot at the best ones, because no one really good wants a job implementing the vision of a business guy."

I don't understand why a really good programmer would not want to help implement the vision of a business guy.

The whole point of a startup is to improve people's lives. Paul Gram understands this; he even says the most important aspect of a startup is making something people want.

Well what if that business guy has a vision that will improve a lot of peoples lives? What if that business guy has an idea for something a lot of other business people would want? Why would a great programmer not want to work with the business guy?

My concern is that if hackers do not keep an open mind about working with others their creativity will be limited to their own interest, needs, and desires. If Hackers are only willing to implement their own visions they may be missing out on some wonderful opportunities to make something people want.
A) Graham (as in Grahamcrackers)

B) The problem is that just as business types are bad at evaluating hackers, hackers are bad at evaluating business types. No one wants to work with someone awful, and the best chance hackers have at avoiding that is to work with people they know how to judge--other hackers.

The issue is not that hackers hate working with business people, its that they hate working with people who are not good at what they do. Given this they use the only proficiency they have--programming--to evaluate people they'll be investing a year or five in.

When a friend of mine proposes a new programming project, I am often really excited about it and can't wait to get working on it; when someone who isn't a programmer proposes ideas its a lot less pleasant because they don't understand the constraints of programming.

When non-programmer Jimmy suggests an idea what it is that Jimmy thinks it would be cool if someone else made this idea into reality and let him profit on it. When a hacker suggests an idea they are saying "lets build this together." Who in their right mind would pick the former if they have a choice?
I think those "special" schools are even worse, because you kind of put pressure on them to be creative. I think regular schools are best if not taken too seriously. Kids will learn despite the system anyway, not because of it.
I think there's a bug. I replied already to mention that the creators of auctomatic, zentix, and Sam Odio who works at Anybots are 100% business guys, but the post seems to have disappeared after dbosson deleted his original post.
Sadly, I haven't found a good roundup yet. Everyone seems to use phpAdsNew or MMM. I'm frankly surprised at the lack of innovation in this area, given the growth in niche-market websites.

Why is there nobody that simply hosts an ad server for you for a monthly fee? They don't even have to handle the payments, just having them act as an independent analytics provider would be plenty. In the age of S3, this is way easy stuff. Come on, someone do this!
ATT piracy effort - part of iPhone deal??
Your comment is still alive

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27969

even though the post you commented on was deleted.

I just added deletion. When something is deleted, it really goes away. This is different from marking something as dead. You can still see dead stuff if you set showdead to yes.

Deletion is for submitters who change their mind; marking stuff as dead is for editors to do to spams and offtopic submissions.
I think he's totally wrong and what davidw said about focus is right on. It's easy to generalize any idea, but most of the time it just leads to mediocrity. Force the expansion out of your mind until you've completely dominated your current target. By then you'll probably see much better ways to expand than this obvious generalization.
Thank you for the input staunch. I def agree with everything you said. I also think its good to set goals for yourself and think well into the future, even though most of your original ideas and plans will end up far from where you had anticipated.

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."
AT&T to target pirated content on its network
Aren't you then leaving room for a competitor to be more generous by letting users stay inside Facebook?
OfficeOval launches a play stock market for political symbols (presidential candidates)
Almost everyone has grand visions of changing the world. Hackers can implement their ideas, why would they implement someone else's?
The same metaphorical wolf.

Not the exact. same. wolf.
Why is that so important? Why does it matter if you sometimes need to leave Facebook?
Definitely true, especially for something like up-voting. I mean, it might fail on 0.1% of clicks, but 0.1% accuracy on a vote is pretty good.

I guess if one was really concerned, you could update the UI immediately like News.YC does, and then change it back or show an error if it does happen to come back failed.
In the best case scenario this service would become popular among a certain subset of the country. It would never be as sweeping as he imagines, in the US. My money is still on mass transit + bicycles as a good solution to the problem of cars.
A compiled language that links in those classes and methods at compile time does resolve this issue, but it's not related to types (and you have to wait on the bloody thing to compile every time you change one character in the file).

How is it not related to the compile-time name resolution and type checking? In a compiled typed language, you would get a compile or link error if the symbol is not found. I regularly write and refactor C++ by inducing compile or link errors to identify the spots in the code where a specific method is called from.
When he first deleted his original comment, it said (deleted) in its place, but my reply still showed up under it. I think that makes more sense than hiding all the children replies of a parent that is deleted.
This is a problem I have been dealing with.

There's been this stigma now that it's all about the hackers and that business guys are nothing but dead weight and really do not provide nor contribute anything to a given project. It's almost as if just because someone's forte is business, all other aspects of that person are soon ignored, despite how brilliant, creative, or motivated a person can be.

My entire life I have considered myself an extremely creative person and one who can understand, analyze, and improve upon existing technologies. In addition, taking care of the business/financial side of matters has also been a strong point of mine. So here I am, a soon to be college junior, and I am extremely serious about starting a startup. I firmly believe that I have great ideas, and would love to team up with a team of hackers to get something going. I would handle the business end, but I would be equally involved in development, being a powerhouse of ideas and creativity.

The problem is, every time I approach a hacker about starting a project and bring up the subject of my contributions to the business end and also me being a source of ideas and creativity, they are instantly turned away, and essentially treat me as someone who would be useless as far as the development of the product and one who is just trying to take advantage of their hacking skills so that I can make a few bucks.

I'm all for hackers; without them, you're really nowhere and can't get anywhere. But there are many others, beyond the realm of hackers, that have great ideas, possess creativity, and who can use his/her creativity to make something successful. Perhaps it's me being paranoid or jumping to uninformed assumptions, but I really do sense this stigma against anyone who is not a hacker, ESPECIALLY, against those who can help out on the business end. And at times, I look at myself and feel incredibly discouraged because of things that I have read and have heard essentially delivering the message that if you're not a hacker, you really cannot be successful in this world of tech startups.

However discouraged I may get, I'm out to prove this stigma wrong. :P
Pg adds a 'delete' feature for submitters; 'dead' is now for moderators
"Bribe, payoff...." How disgusting. He seems to feel entitled to ride on the coattails of entrepreneurs and bet on them as if they were racehorses.

It is ridiculous to compare buying part of the company from the entrepreneurs to bribing them. A bribe entails a betrayal of trust. According to Ron, the entrepreneurs are betraying the company by accepting money. But the entrepreneurs are the company and are the shareholders. There is no betrayal of trust.

The entrepreneurs are suddenly getting better offers and "first-tier" VCs can't keep giving them raw deals. So of course Ron is sad. It looks to him as though the good old days are fading away. If this trend continues, the entrepreneurs will be able to get the company to achieve their own, more modest goals. They won't have to strike out when swinging for the fences in order to make VCs happy.

Forgive us for not wanting to be your slaves, Ron.
Wil Shipley on unit tests:

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/09/unit-testing-is-teh-suck-urr.html

I think what he's saying is unit tests don't add much if you are doing UI type development. It is hard to write unit tests for UIs (web or GUI), so if most of your code is UI code, don't bother.

However, if you are writing a library that will be used by a lot of coders, unit tests are probably indispensable. Otherwise, you would never be able to make even simple architecture or design changes (refactoring).
I think given two otherwise similar services the one that's fully functional inside Facebook will get more users.
it depends, and in my experience can be reduced to a cost/benefit analysis. a sprinkle of different things has worked for me -- some things to think about:

what's the impact of a typical bug in your app: an error 500 page (annoying) or a BSOD or corrupted data (much worse) or a missile hitting a house? these will merit different levels of testing rigor.

if something is breaking, how do you even know? how much time will have elapsed? how long will it take you to find the cause, and is suitable debugging information available for your investigation? how quickly can you come up with a fix, and how expensive is it to deploy it? this is, in my experience, a much more effective place to optimize if you're a web app, especially if you're a small team.

for the non-core pieces of a web app, i'd rather release twice as fast and have logging and monitoring infrastructure in place to find and fix problems quickly (e.g. exception - logged and SMSed to our cell phones) than spend 2x to write unit tests (and maintaining them later.) a nice property is that you'll tend to find bugs roughly in order of decreasing impact, or at least prevalence. however, this approach won't do much against silent failures or bugs that are both rare and high impact.

there are lots of other effective tools: automated smoke tests (by which i mean end-to-end tests that quickly test large pieces of the app) deliver a lot of bang for buck, and root out unintended consequences of seemingly local changes that even unit tests sometimes miss. i also find generous use of the assert keyword finds failures fast/nearer to the cause.
Unless the other one already has a lot more users.
codeLullaby - looking for a job? we can always use a good hacker... let me know michael@justin.tv
That guy is hard to watch. He really needs to get to the point.
Doesn't really say anything about startups...
I don't want to come across as anti-unit-test or anti-studies but I suggest you run your own study and gauge your own performance rather than assuming you and your team perform as an average team does.

Thanks to the version control tools we use this is easy. Adopt a policy where you commit code for a SINGLE reason at a time. Enumerate a few standard reasons such as BUGFIX, FEATURE, FEATURE_AND_UNIT_TEST, REQUIREMENTS_CHANGE, UNIT_TEST_MAINTENANCE. Estimate the engineering time that was spent on making the change. Log that duration. Periodically analyze your performance and see for yourself how much time unit-testing is costing or saving you.
'... this stigma now that it's all about the hackers and that business guys are nothing but dead weight ...'

In the tech startup world this is pretty close to the truth in small companies. In larger ones, where business types have places to hide from bully hackers, it's the other way around. The thing that comes to mind is if you can't understand technology it makes it harder to grasp the opportunities. It's hard enough as it is. I can think of only a few business MBA's who have created & run successful startup tech companies. (Donna Dubinsky, of Palm is one that comes to mind). There's a good article on "OnStartups, You Don't Need A World-Class Management Team" about why management aren't needed ~ http://tinyurl.com/35dmlz

But why concentrate on just startups? What about other examples of non-tech entrepreneurs that strike out? One that comes to mind is Shawn Nelson of LoveSac fame who saw the combination of retro 70's spirit + emerging Chinese manufacturing and a gap in the furniture market and a new company was born. ~ http://www.lovesac.com/lovesac/history.php

The irony of 'outsourcing management' in startups is not lost on me.
He's pointing out that the Windows algorithm uses a lot of tricks to compensate for the low resolution of screens compared to paper. As screens approach the crispness of paper, those tricks will become pointless distortions. In a roughly similar way, fonts designed to come through clearly in faxes tend to look dumbed-down in print.

There's another issue here which I haven't seen mentioned -- OS X assumes, by default, that displays have a gamma of 1.8, while 2.2 is traditional on Windows. For everyday non-graphics work, the difference is lost in the varition between monitors, but it will tend to make Windows antialiasing look slightly too heavy on Macs and vice-versa. (Once I noticed it, it was easy to spot screenshots of ClearType on my Mac LCD -- it's too colorful and "sparkly" compared to the system antialiasing.) If Apple didn't account for this, it may add to the confusion.
In regards to staunch's comment I feel A Hacker would implement someone else's ideas if they felt enough people would want the idea to be implemented.

I would like to thank [willarson] I found his comment to be insightful and will take to heart what he has said about a non-programmer not understanding the capacity of programming.

It sounds like hackers are not completely shut down to working with a non-technical person as long as that person can add his fair share of value.

I am now going to throw a kicker into the business / hacker relationship. What if a business guy has a vision that both he and the hacker agree has a chance to improve peoples lives. And on top of this vision he has the money to fund it. What is the hacker's response? And how should the equity be divided?
I use prototype.js. I haven't found a good reason to use anything else, yet.
Speaking of that, how is the community at metafilter doing?
this post includes some very good points
Marc Andreessen: Paper of the week: History's view of the dot com boom
"I don't understand why a really good programmer would not want to help implement the vision of a business guy."

Because the image that that sort of talk conjures is of me sitting around toiling trying to create something, and you leaning back in your plush chair saying "no no, it's got to do this too - no, wait, scratch that, let's change X, Y, and Z".

That's admittedly a caricature, and probably not very fair to you, but one of the reasons it's easier to be all hackers is that divying up work is made far easier. It's easy to see that everyone's pulling their weight.