skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have trouble believing just on his word alone that StevePavlina.com generates $40000/month. It's possible, but I'd have to see some evidence.
Oregon's got a lot going in the open source arena (besides having Linus Torvalds living there). Almost enough to make me pack up and go home...
Many startups begin without VC funding and then take it as a mezzanine round before the IPO. They don't need the cash at that point; oftentimes, they're already profitable. But the VCs have connections to investment banks that can smooth the IPO process.

Microsoft is the best example of this. I think ViaWeb may have done something similar before its acquisition.
How does it compare?

Well, the objectives may be similar but Yahoo's execution is much more deliberate.

While Google's 20% time is a corporate policy that encourages side-projects (that may see see the light of day in the form of a beta product), Brickhouse is Yahoo's full-fledged effort to develop novel ideas in-house that it has been historically purchasing at premium prices.

It seems that Brickhouse, as a division, is able to pursue small, "startup-like" ideas that might stray from Yahoo's corporate vision.
What are the restrictions? I somehow doubt that you can do whatever you want.
The availability of APIs is absolutely the way to go, perhaps inducing a symbiotic growth relationship between multiple web networks/services.

A new, niche network could integrate, say, Facebook, into their service. This would help the user accept the new network, as he wouldn't need to again add to his already detached web identity.

This extension -- or compliment -- of networks is a potential solution to the problem of fragmented identities spread across the web.
I don't know; I don't work there. :)

It's still a company, after all. They pursue interesting, and even perhaps daring, ideas as a team. I didn't see any implications of a chaotic operation.
Their secret weapon is some crazy orange topped cyborg with wheels for legs...
After reading the article, I spent a few moments thinking of the applications for such software.

It definitely gets me excited. I've worked with some great people who didn't have the most masterful command of English. Nitpicking grammar aside, sometimes these shortcomings become effective barriers in a working relationship. Documenting software specs or just conducting regular correspondence with an international team definitely brings these, well, obstacles to light. With WhiteSmoke's software, I can see a lot of rough roads being paved.

But then, there's never an application without implication. Just as some have relied on a spell and grammar check to do the dirty work, I have a feeling this software will be used often as a substitute for proper proof-reading.
Amazing. I want that sort of lifestyle for a few years.

No, really.

At the company I work, it's beginning to feel big-companyish. There's around 100 employees now, and the bureaucracy is starting to set in. Despite that, we still get features rolled out at a nice rate, but I really have no emotional connection to the product we make. That doesn't mean I don't do quality work. That just means I'm not as interested as I could be.

On the other hand, if my future depended on the success of my product, then I'd be kickin'. I personally think that even with the stress, the time, the lack of sleep, that it would be one of the most fun experiences of my life, because I'd get to see my product morph from nothing into everything. Totally worth it.

Unfortunately, I have to feed myself, so I can't just quit and run after my idea. But if I manage to scrape even $15k together, I'm doing it.
I'd just like visited links to be more different from unvisited links. Right now I have to look closely to distinguish between the two.
Anyone else whip open a text editor and time themselves on the FizzBuzz example? :)

Just for kicks: One minute, give or take.
haha, yeah about that long
Feature request: remember me being logged in with this browser.
Here is a point I made at that blog...One very small piece of this puzzle I havent read hereI work for a global investment bank and here we manage risk. Paying one person 3x to do the work of 5 headcount is greatuntil that person gets sick, moves to Iceland to get married, quits to go on Beauty and the Geek, gets burnt out, falls off a bridge, etc. Then you are screwed. That is a huge problem from a management perspective.
There's only one metric worth paying attention to when deciding how good a place is for entrepreneurs - the number of successful companies started there.

Silicon Valley is the best place for tech startups because there are more tech success stories here than anywhere else. Success stories bring with them:
- Capital injection into the economy
- Happy investors prepared to take more risk in their portfolio
- Inspiration to young entrepreneurs
- More networks and experience

Anything else is irrelevant in my opinion.
This reminds me of those college rankings where they calculate each college's score by dividing the number of books in the library by the percent of faculty with beards. GI, GO.
The quote about getting your users laid has been one of my AIM away messages for the last two years. I believe the phrase may have also showed up in a business plan or two :-)
Your not alone:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000804.html
VCs certainly live in a very chummy world, but their valuations are not stingy. In fact they're artificially high, because the structure of VC funds pushes them to make excessively large investments, and that in turn means valuations have to be high or the founders aren't left with enough stock to keep them interested.
Compulsive problem solving, even when it measures minimum achievement, is broadly attractive. :)

I like this quote: "I suppose it's like walking into Guitar Center and yelling 'most guitarists can't play Stairway to Heaven!'"
one thing we've realised from talking to smart people is that founders shouldn't get caught up in the idea of high valuations being a good thing. initially we thought the higher valuation we got for our company the "better" we had done.

that's wrong. high valuations both limit your options and make it harder for you to give a good return for your investors. if this is your first startup that's not what you want to do. from now on i'll always be aiming for a reasonable valuation and not wasting time trying to drive it up by the odd %.
I wouldn't say you're screwed. I'd say you just need to get another equivalently high-powered person to sub in. It'd take them a while to load the code into their head, but so does any replacement programmer. And, if you do know how to get Eric, getting just one more is probably not that hard.
A: too busy checking news.YC
I think that ties into what the author said about the advantage of mediocre teams for long term projects. Its sometimes better to having something kludgy and understandable than an elegant hack that no one else will understand.
TechCrunch: Is Spotplex a better Digg?
Wesabe gets funded by O'Reilly Ventures
Interview With a 13 Year Old Entrepreneur
So what's the consensus on how well this will work?

It definitely seems like a step in the right direction; Yahoo probably has a great deal of internal talent that they are not tapping into. Giving that talent freedom and incentive should make Yahoo more competitive.

But so many of the advantages of real startups are unlikely to apply. What strikes me as one of the biggest factors is that this seems unlikely to draw in too much external talent. The pool of people likely to start successful startups don't want to work for Yahoo until they're getting paid a lot to do so. As the yahoo vp said "It is generally cheaper to incubate these things than to buy them"
Great idea; it sounds like someone at Yahoo is taking Christensen's advice.

This will only work well if the division is given enough autonomy. If a small division is trying to help meet the massive revenue goals of mainstream Yahoo, it's just not going to work. They're not going to get the resources or motivation that they need.

That's the problem with Google's 20% time. You're not really encouraged to do little projects, something that a startup might do. Instead, you're encouraged to contribute to the bottom line of Google, which severely limits the kind of things you can work on (i.e., "do search or you're wasting your time"). This is compounded by the fact that your 20% time is inconsistently factored into your employee evaluation (for better or for worse).
Seriosity tries to solve email spam -- with virtual currency
...to the dismay of snipshot?

http://snipshot.com
This sounds a lot like PG's IT Conversations interview mixed with one or two of his essays.
5 Technologies that Will Impact the 2008 Elections
It's basically Digg + an ad hoc reputation system. The good news is that it will eliminate most linkspam. The bad news is that it will filter out a lot of insightful content. The systemic design rewards the people who post every single day, rather than those who post the occasional great piece. The reason is that if you only post occasionally then it's very hard to build up a following, unless you write for a techy audience who all use RSS or you make Digg or Slashdot regularly. Instead of encouraging people to speak up when they have something valuable to say, it seems to be encouraging almost the opposite. [insert joke about my comments here].

I do, however, predict that this site will have a lot of stories with really awesome headlines.
How can I find pages that are in the no-mans-land between top and new? I saw a submission for Trevor's article on languages: http://tlb.org/busywork.html but now I have no way of finding the discussion about it. On reddit the submit bookmarklet would find it with its dup-detection.

Dup detection seems brain dead to implement; is there a deliberate reason news.yc doesn't have it?
I agree, I have long thought that Yahoo was getting "blown out of the water" and they must to *something* to breathe a little life back into their once dominant company.

I have been battling myself over the issue of who to go to with my idea. I believe from my incredibly fortunate and diverse upbringing, lifelong experiences with computers, social networks, MMO interactions, I have come up with a web application that will organize the worlds information in a better way. As a result it will not only appeal to everyone, but help everyone in the world with a computer live more productive and "better" lives. Ambitious? yes. But in case you didn't know.. Facebook, Myspace, Wiki, and Reddit are represent the infant stage of how we will organize the worlds information.

The problem I face now is who to go to... Do I find team of great "Hackers" (not so easy to find in Madison but I will be graduating in May) and start working on a beta and focus on angel/seed/Ycom funding? Do i go to the Bill and Melinda gates foundation and go though probably years of red tape in order to get my idea noticed. Or do I go to a company like Yahoo and tell them "your whole web philosophy and yahoo pages are flawed and I can show you how you can regain the Internet power you once had" Or do I just apply to their "brickhouse" division and hope they give me stock if my idea is successful.

The dilemma as I see it is that because this will be my lifelong endeavor, I want to give it the best chance to succeed. It is not even about the money, even though the most powerful information browsing tool (google currently) will always be the most powerful and profitable company in the world. I just want to make sure Rupert's empire doesn't get a hold of these ideas because it could be used for real evil if all the worlds information was in his hands...
True, its not startup news, but it is a moderately interesting article, and obviously the community loved it. Well, that or they were trying to suck up to pg. ;)
I read this sort of pre-announcement as a sign of panic. "Wait! Don't use any of those web-based Photoshop replacements. We're going to write a web-based image editor ourselves."
ecuzzillo, your point is valid but in the environment of a large company, hiring can take months, there is a huge administrative expense associated with the hiring process and the top 1% is still the top 1%...hard to find even if you had already found the first Eric.
This top 10 list is worthless your right. especially to this community. Heres why:

The entrepreneurs on this "newsgroup" are ALL web entrepreneurs. This means that half of the criteria do not even pertain our needs/interests as founders of entrepreneurial ventures. (tech populations / graduation rates may apply but those should be looked at separately.

Let me pose this question. If VC/angel fudning / programmers needs / location was not an issue, where would you start your company?

There are a lot of places in this country that in my opinion would gather much more interest on a local level that starting a company in NY or SF. I think by starting a web company in an already "hot" web area is like opening a starbucks across the street from a starbucks? Sure you know it will get business, but it would be better if it was the 1st starbucks on a major University Campus.

By launching in a less saturated market, you have the benefit of traditional sources of media attention so that you receive high adoption rates locally, which as we know is vital to high adoption rates globally. Does company location have anything to do with adoption rates?

Thoughts?
Yahoo has bigger problems than the lack of innovation. It's insanely bloated as a company now. Why Yahoo Photos and Flickr? Why My Yahoo and My Web and Delicious? Why can't I log in to Delicious with my Yahoo login? Why is their web page so cluttered? They really need to cut it down. Dump Yahoo Photos, dump My Web and Yahoo 360. Streamline into 5 areas: Media (News, TV, Commercial Video), Search (Panama), Social Media (Flickr, Delicious, My Yahoo, Music), Email (most critical) and Hosting (I'd drop hosting too but I don't have an MBA and 5 is a much nicer number than 4). Thats my opinion, but I don't have an MBA... just some common sense.
I suppose the questionable part was that I was mildly skeptical that that tradition was alive and well at Stanford. Do you have any evidence for that?
it's a good article. If you read it in conjunction with "succinctness is power" ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html you can get another view on what parts of languages are useful & why.

'... working on Arc with Paul and if any of his ideas are making it in there ...'

Dont know. They both appear to be pretty busy on their own stuff.

Matt you made the comment on reddit, 'Arc "compiles" into Scheme' didn't you? ~ http://reddit.com/info/15gkq/comments/c15iof
Netscape Founder Tries To Build Online Communities
'... I don't think the fact that the site is written in Arc makes the site itself any more interesting. ...'

I do. I'm pretty sure the site, layout & idea have been inspired by the defection from lisp to python ~ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rewritingreddit

As the site progresses it proves a point. That "Reddit" could have continued in Lisp had they persisted and that "Lisp -like languages", can still cut it.
Guy Kawasaki - Art of Start Video
not new, but worth a watch.
Firefox 3.0 opens door to Web apps, Mozilla says
I like it, and yes, I'm sure you can combine it with social networks to get something compelling (e.g., you can make it cheaper to send email to people who have designated you as a friend, etc.). It's strange to see the overwhelmingly negative reaction on TechCrunch though.
What's interesting is that FF3 may allow you to use webapps offline.
Spotplex seems to be down currently, so I haven't been able to fully explore the site. However, based on the Techcrunch coverage, it seems like this will ultimately be just another content suggestion site. I like the innovative way of sourcing stories, but at the end of the day, it will just be another wall for news to echo off of. If a story makes it to the front page of Spotplex, there's a good chance we'll see it on Digg. And then Reddit. And so on.

However, Spotplex will ultimately garner a different type of reader base, so it should provide some variety from that standpoint. Not to mention, now we're getting one step closer to our news feeders becoming "self aware."
Marc Andreessen's latest startup - allows users to create social networks
This reminds me a bit of the Bell Labs west-coast startup program. Back in the 1990s, they created their internal startup area.

While it did do was create a lot of hostility, and keeping of secrets from other divisions. It divided the company up, and most of the internal groups didn't end up doing well..

Check out "Bell Labs: Life in the Crown Jewel", it's an interesting read on the history of the labs.

It seems that independent (external) funding sources can do much better- They can fund any group that shows promise, no matter where it originated.. They put the risk into the hands of the founders, and they have a wider market to choose from.

-C
I would suspect that here, they pull you directly away from your current projects, to work on the new Startup- This isn't 20% time, it's "Work on your own time until you have a good prototype.. Then, 100% time"
Web 2.0 & Tech Conferences of 2007
It being March, many of these events have since passed. There are still a number to look forward to, including the Web2.0 Expo in April and Summit in October.
how equity dilution works
What's The Optimal Number Of Co-Founders For A Startup? 2.09!
Startup Without Falling Down
Employee vs. Entrepreneur: What's the Difference?
This is the best thing I've read in a long time
New Travel-startup launched: 71miles.com
The incredibly shrinking VC model
In the environment of a normal large company, the giant administrative expense of hiring people (and in general the suckiness of being in a big company) is a far bigger problem than trying to find a good programmer.
Factor 0.88 released
Changelog: http://factorcode.org/responder/help/show-help?topic=changes
Closes doors for every other browser?
Newest web app: Photoshop!?
Photoshop is often given as a specific example of something that shouldn't be built as a web app, and I think for good reasons. It will be really interesting to see if they can get the UI to be responsive (or, usable, even). I'm sure they wouldn't butcher their fantastic brand though so I guess they've got got a plan for that.

I find it interesting that Photoshop started out as a pro level app that became immensely popular based on its quality, then a cut down Photoshop elements was released a year or two ago for a fraction of the price, and now this free web version. What is the purpose of the web version? Is it a strategic move to get a large audience and upsell them to Elements? Or have they drank the kool aid and are going to try to get ad revenue from it?
Sick, but true.

I find I can't work at a reasonable pace. Either I'm slacking off, and for all intents look like an incompetent retard, or else, I'm in crisis mode and will do whatever it takes. Unfortunately, after crisis mode, I'm burnt out for a week.

There's an amazing feeling of monastic purity to working no-holds-barred on a problem, though. It's simplifying. No life -- no worries! That and the adrenaline rush of looking into the abyss and then finding some way around, or over.
Well look at the members of the Hoover Institute: Donald Rumsfield, Condi Rice, Shelby Steele, etc.

In the same way IQ tests were used to support white chauvinism by creating an Us vs Them dynamic back then, the Soviet Union was used to create the Us vs Them dynamic during the cold war and Al Qaeda is used to create it today. It's a cheap way of drumming up nationalistic support by creating a common enemy. Whether the common enemy is black people, Jewish people, the Russians, Al Qaeda, Iran, etc., it doesn't matter, they're all used to advance the same governmental policies. The Hoover Institute is today the center of this neocon philosophy.

C.f. The Power of Nightmares:
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Also, they receive a large amount of funding from the Bradley Institute, the same group that funds Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve) and others who write about using IQ as part of public policy.
Unfortunately, I have to feed myself, so I can't just quit and run after my idea. But if I manage to scrape even $15k together, I'm doing it.

You should read this article: http://www.doingsuccess.com/article_514.shtml
Overheard outside a former boss's office:

"We're not talking customer service, we're talking cunnilingus! Are they happy? I want you to make them happy!"
I finally got around to trying EC2 this weekend, and it's pretty slick. I just wanted a *nix box to try out SBCL threading. I love the convenience.

Anyone know off-hand what extended instruction set these machine instances offer? I.e. MMX? SSE? SSE2?
I love the picture of pg waving his finger from the back of the scooter. I half expected the next shot to be him pushing one of the other dudes, with his finger. The next shot should have been of said dude falling over as his CG moves outside the convex hull of his feet.
Once you get past the "motivational speak", there are some good points that he makes. We truly are conditioned to believe that getting a job is the best way to provide for your family. I grew up in a restaurant, so the principle of working hard for what you earn was instilled in me at an early age. Now, thanks mostly to pg's essays, I realize that the best way to provide is to work smart - start a company, give it your all for a few years, and let it generate income as a return for the wealth I've created.
The Web's Best Interface Design
Great Stash of Top-Secret YC Talks & Presentations (MP3)
It seems like a good move on the surface. Digging a little deeper, though, one notices a couple of quotes:

"But he compares what he and Fake are doing to what record label executives do, searching out the best talent."

Someone who compares himself favorably to a record label executive in today's world is out of touch with how the target demographic for Brickhouse products feels about such things. I don't know how much trust I could place in Horowitz's decisions regarding this new internal "startup".

"Horowitz...said the figure would be somewhere between a pat on the back and an acquisition-size bonus."

If I were a Yahoo employee, I don't think I'd feel too reassured that my hard work would get appropriately recognized. That "pat on a back" may be for an excellent idea, well executed, but unfortunately not able to be capitalized upon within Yahoo's current structure.

It seems to me that the idea of Brickhouse is good, but it may be a case of too little, too late. I don't get the feeling that it will be able to achieve its potential.
While I can't say I agree with the entire list, I submitted the link to start a discussion on interface design. Usability, or the "user experience" as I like to think of it, is the most important aspect of an application in my mind. It determines whether people will be quick to adopt your offering or even try it out at all. I'm actually a big fan of rich Internet applications, but I see "richness" applied too liberally in places where simplicity would have been preferable. I've been spending some time reading about human-computer interaction, and it's a fascinating field.