skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pretty much. You're going to have to deal with trade offs and be flexible depending on where you want your widget to be embeddable. You've got more control if you hand out js code (think adsense), but a lot more sites are going to accept your code if you hand out the html for a flash object (think youtube). You should be open to multiple versions.

You might take a look at a widget directory service like widgetbox (http://www.widgetbox.com/ ). They try and take care of some of this, but if you use them or not you're still going to want to know what works where and why.

Get ready to sign up for lots of accounts and test your widget everywhere.
Nothing has changed in karma calculations.
Congrats, that is a big step. I can remember the first time we received investment with nothing but fondness. It like the first time you have sex, you'll never forget it...
Yipes. Decreasing legal expenses is about 1% of the value of YC. By far the most important thing we do is work with people on their ideas. Then teaching how to present to investors, then introductions, technical advice, advice about negotiating deals, help in disputes between founders, the value of the other YC founders, help in recruiting...
What's your online collaboration platform? (50% google)
The Tech Lab (Dave Winer's view on tech he would like to see built)
MySpace founder looks to the future (#1, competition is hotting up,  losing its edge?)
10 Spock invites available: ping me in comments
tbl on the read/write web (writing not with hypertext, just text, results in more creative medium)
I know, I was just teasing you... hence the emoction.
"10 spock invites" and no link with invites or email address is ill-logical. Having received personal spock invite via email is not

having said that, here's my first impression

- signup: email + firstname + lastname

- find friends: plaxo, gmail, gmail, aol, yahoo, hotmail
- control identity: works off existing social sites (myspace, linkedin,
friendster sites, gmail, yahoo & aol email)

- log in, pwd

- vote on if details are correct (social voting on your details?)

- add personal info ... tags, sites, bio, name, age, dob, address

Searching: Ho hum. Lots of dead people are listed. Quick search on names I found lots of inflated cv-like & MySpace entries. Maybe thats why the vote is added to allow checks & balances to occur. Laugh at people who are not me.
Need a first name & last as well as your email.

or write to carlos -t- bueno -d- org if you don't wanna be an exhibitionist.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the "Don't call me unless I know you" ethic.
Thinking that getting a good lawyer will get you investment is fallacy. The only thing that gets you an investor is showing traction and having a business model (at some point in the future, at least.)

That said, having a good lawyer is important just for legal reasons and because the lawyer can foresee complex situations (founders splitting up and so on) that you wouldn't.
Kyro Beshay, kbeshay@gmail.com
All the animation storyboard artists I work with use sharpies at first too, for the same reasons. It helps you focus on the story instead of design details, which are better resolved later in the process (when you know you aren't going to change the broad strokes).
Is Google worried about the Facebook platform?  After all, why pay for advertising if you don't need to?
Thanks for disabusing me of that notion - I don't mean to spread misinformation or anything.
I had a jaw deformity, which didn't get corrected until I was an adult. (Had I not been so socially withdrawn, I might have gone to a better school when I was younger.) By the time my condition was treated, years past the time most of my peers would have started families, it was too late: I had become used to having time to work on my own projects, and having to get up every day to do the kind of unfulfilling work fathers typically have to do to provide for a family would have been intollerable. I was spared.
EBay pulls all its advertising from Google's network
I'd like to thank everyone who has responded to my question - you all rock.

The verdict: I will not be going with my friend the lawyer, but rather look into some sort of fee-deferral arrangement with a firm that specializes in this type of thing.
I use web-based icon generators, here's two I bookmarked that are pretty useful:

http://antifavicon.com/

http://www.degraeve.com/favicon/
I wanted to debate whether being partial to a specific group of people limits creativity, but it seems people would rather debate the importance of business guys so I too will give my input on business guys.

I would like to make an effort to reframe the word business guys. Currently when people use or hear that word they think MBA, consultant, Wallstreet, Investment Banker, VC, Money, and ego, all of which are destructive to a startup.

But someone who simply understands the basics of business can be very beneficial to programmers and startups.

A lot can be learned from a business guy who understands how to manage cash flow so that the inflows are greater than the outflows, who has an ability to be close to the customer, who understands sales and marketing so that when he communicates he talks about the benefits and not the features, someone who can speck publicly and inspire others.

This value is a lot less tangible than 40,000 lines of beautiful code but I can assure you it is just as important.
There's no inherent value for tickets (or anything). Their value subjective - what people will pay for them. There's nothing more "right" about the price the ticketing office charges than the price the scalper charges.

It's not only a 10 minute difference, a scalper will allow you to buy a ticket 1 minute before the show starts - that's worth something.
I tend to write unit tests for core functions/modules as I develop them. It helps me create an API and to think about it's use/documentation. I also write tests whenever I come across a non trivial bug: write a test to create the bug, fix the bug, prove it by passing test. I haven't gone the whole hog and employed test driven development. I think all types of testing matter most once deployed. You need to prevent your customers 'testing' your app :-) Of course retro fitting tests is often a waste of time as your perspective isn't so clear.

There is always a balancing act between prefect text book engineering and just making some money!
I recall hearing about some company that accepted tons of small investments, which made getting signatures at acquisition time a real pain. Can't remember what company though.
Will he eat them like a Frenchman too?
It's like the first time you have good sex, you'll never forget it...

There, fixed that for you ;)
Look at what you offer and compare it to what your target market measures, manages, and values. If your offer doesn't register...you have two choices 1) reposition your offer to align with something they value 2) find a way to make whatever you're offering an issue that needs to be valued, measured or managed.

What about a third choice? Change who your target market is?
Google should be worried. By opening its doors to the world, Facebook is in effect employing 33k of the brightest, more entrepreneurial minds the world has to offer.

These developers will create great applications that function like advertising, only better. These applications will allow businesses to connect with customers like never before.

Furthermore, I predict because all major businesses will be interacting through Facebook, a new form of currency will begin to emerge.

We are only beginning to see the potential of this platform. Developers are just beginning to "learn the ropes" of this new medium on which to build. The next year will be one to remember for our species.
glad i could help =)
Interesting, Maybe Google will follow suit and allow developers to embed their applications in Google too?

"Furthermore, I predict because all major businesses will be interacting through Facebook, a new form of currency will begin to emerge."

Can I hold you to that?

"The next year will be one to remember for our species."

You don't think you're overselling an API just a little?
I think Google will just acquire Facebook.
That's sad about the jaw. But you know having a family, for me at least, is what fulfils me - not my job. (Which I actually like)
Shouldn't your nick be "trojan"? ;)
Microsoft's bloatware problem (and how open source could help)
Linux leaders plot counterattack on Microsoft
Bush administration attacks 'shield' for bloggers
"Remember, you can always transform an LLC into a C corporation at a later date."

Sure, but the process is not easy nor cheap! It will cost you more to convert LLC to a C than by forming C right away.

What you should have done is form an S and then convert it to C later on. Converting S to C is a matter of filing one form and you don't even need an accountant/lawyer to do it.
An emacs spotlight mode
your right, my comment was not intended as having a good lawyer gets you an investor. simply shows your going about things in a professional manner and not likely to have some dodgy legal snaffu derail you at the last minute.

Some advice about what not to do is a good way to put it.
I don't think I count this as a bug. If you do something stupid, you see something stupid, but it doesn't affect anyone else.
How Justin.TV's Live Video System Was Born
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097
If Facebook sells, it would be a major disappointment. I'd expect it to go public.
It's a good point to raise. Changing markets is sometimes a possibility. Other times a change of market is as difficult as getting a new offer.

The point I wanted to focus on in the post is companies who develop specific offers for specific markets. I work with a number of companies who have great offers, wonderful meetings, and no sales. Many times this is a result of having built something that's interesting, but isn't valued by the end user. I especially see this in the area of expert services - services designed to "fix" problems that aren't measured or monitored by the target audience.
It isn't obvious that the Facebook platform will be the premier platform for companies and developers to connect with customers. Facebook is first to the market with an open and technical robust combination of an API and distribution network but don't bet on it being the last.

I'm sure the "OG's" of the platform wars, Apple and Microsoft, have plans and Google is almost certainly working on something.

There's a reason Google and Microsoft haven't bought facebook, and it's not just because Facebook's price is too high.
It was a general analogy and had nothing to do with this site. Actually, it especially had nothing to do with this site.
CNN, YouTube To Orchestrate Debate On July 23
DeviantArt Raises $3.5M in Series A Funding
I'd say that between the ages of 18-23 your chances of doing something stupid (fighting, drinking) and needing to file a claim should be much greater than your chances of filing a claim for legitimate and unavoidable reasons (tuberculosis).

If you eliminate the stupid reasons, do you really need to worry about insurance?
The article ought to have mentioned HP's "you make what you measure" quote. This is a corollary.
my pleasure! ;-D
Do You Know Why Nobody Makes Nobody A Commencement Speaker?
yeah, like while i admit it's possible, why would businesses necessarily gravitate to a platform which has the image of being for teen and young adolescent dating?

i know they're not free (as in beer), but there have been networks like this around for a while, and they have not become business platforms, even if they are "more serious". i'm thinking of linkedin.com.

i'm not trying to scrap, merely to understand why people think this, rather than believe such notions are matters of early -- and justified -- enthusiasm.
Skin in the Game
"The next year will be one to remember for our species."

Thanks to you I can no longer accurately claim that the Facebook Platform actually does measure up to all the hype. :-)
Is it safe to use JavaScript to eval JSON-like data from your own servers?
Scenario: I've got a page which does an Ajax request and eval()s the response. I trust the response, because it's from our own servers (and simply contains a dictionary). But are there any possible issues I'm forgetting?
The Irrational Investor
Yah seriously. Sure, some fathers have sucky jobs they keep because of their families. But work and family aren't mutually exclusive.
Most programmers don't know how to develop software very well. You shouldn't be surprised "biz guys" are totally ignorant. Most non-programmers think you can have marketing and design people come up with "specs" and then hand it off to have it "programmed". That almost never works and yet it's by far the most common method. People who think this is a good practice should be no where near the helm of a technology company.

Some web companies are not technology companies though. I think the "biz guy" approach works for those -- occasionally. Digg was a cheap project on elance. The success for that site was more about a TechTV/Kevin Rose community. MySpace is similar.

Facebook a non-technology company becoming one.
They will never eliminate copyright infringement completely. We really need them to just get the US laws on this stuff clarified and stable.

It reminds me of PayPal's fraud issues. Very similar kind of risk management issue. Google should buy Slide just to get Max Levchin working on YouTube.

Like credit card processing maybe every company could have a "charge back ratio" type number that was regulated by a neutral third party. If more than 2% of your videos are infringing you get shutdown. I know there's a million reason that won't happen, but I think something like that might work. Infringement on a small scale is acceptable by all parties, it's the NFL outtakes with 1.5 million views that piss people off.
Some people go so far as "unschooling". Lots of stuff on the web about it. Basically allowing children to learn whatever interests them whenever they want. I would absolutely do this with my children. Unless they weren't too bright, then I'd send them to public school and they'd enjoy it.
Powerset: Advanced Modelling Spreadsheets to answer "What would happen if we actually launched?"
Ruby: A Python Programmer's Perspective
It looks like they're so ready to be the next Google they're just going to skip right past hard work and reality. Why have actual growth charts that might be depressing, when you can just make up your own and be happy?

They've put more effort into their modeling tool than some startups put into their successful products. If they were an agile little startup it might be really smart to turn the company into a Growth Forecasting service.
"...and had expansion slots.

I don't think he does remember or agrees. Jobs was always against that kind of expansion. He's a control freak. Why let other people ruin perfection? Wozniak says that's the only real heated argument they ever had.

Still. I wouldn't bet against Jobs knowing what's up. He was definitely right about the minimalist iPod. I want a fold out keyboard anyway.
7 Kickass iPhone Apps That Don't Exist Yet (make one before 29th :)
Yeah. I'd like that. A remailer service is ideal and mind numbingly simple. If there is a email spam problem I'm sure PG will think up a solution.
Ruby on Rails vs PHP Ads (Pretty funny)
Paul Buchheit: Insights into "Don't be evil"
Neato, sans XMLHttpRequest.
True; the original Macintosh is well known for having no slots, and for that matter no cursor keys.
proxies. Is what the client receiving actually from your server and not from something between them and you.
Maximize startup visibility with YouTube Videos
With S-corporations,

"Shareholders must be U.S. citizens or residents, and must be natural persons"

Since I live in Europe, the potential to find and add a co-founder or two who is not a US citizen is there, and an LLC would still work for that, afaik. Or at least it may be a possibility, whereas I'm sure it isn't with an S-corp.
rugby is the new management group-speak analogy? did i miss the /sarcasm tag?
The ban on corporate sales of the iPhone may be partly to prevent the early verdicts from being passed by Blackberry fans and others who are accustomed to typing lots of email on a large physical phone keyboard.
Yahoo! XSS Flaw exposed
Andrew Chen: What's your WSAT? (*Web 2.0 Startup Aptitude Test)
Beta launch: Squeezed Books (YC wasn't-even-submitted company)
Quick: Big screen development
On a playful note, since I've seen a couple "YC reject" tagged launches, I thought I'd label mine "YC wasn't-even-submitted".

In any case, the idea comes from something that Phillip Greenspun wrote, which sums up what I think of some (but not all) business books:

"This book illustrates a fault in the publishing industry. If you have
a 50-page idea it is too long for a magazine. But it is too short for
a book. So if you wanted to get it distributed before the Web came
along, you had to drop in words until you reached 200 pages."

I wanted to create an open and collaborative site for business book summaries. There are already sites out there that charge between 100-200 USD a year for a stream of summaries, but that has two problems:

- Of course, it prices many people out of the market.

- More importantly, I want to create a place where people can discuss these books. Reading something is only part of learning. Going out and actually doing something is probably the best way, but being able to discuss ideas is also pretty helpful.

So... the result was this site, which I put together pretty quickly. I had fun adding a few summaries (I found that writing down what I'd learned from a book forced me to think about it a bit more), got a few friends to add others, and here we are.

By signing up for the site and working on a summary or two, you get a link back to your own site, as well as a link to your amazon wishlist, with encouragement to visitors to spring for a book or two for people who have worked on high quality summaries.

Constructive comments/suggestions/whatever more than welcome!
Any recommendations for good tutorials on the equity problem? I somehow find it very hard to get a good understanding of it, and most "found a business" books seem to avoid the issue, too.

Assuming zero knowledge... For example, what does it mean to own equity? If you own 10% of the company, I suppose it doesn't mean that you get 10% of it's earnings. I gues you would get 10% of dividends? But what if the company never decides to pay dividends? Since you only have 10%, there seems to be nothing you could do against it? Rather than pay dividends, the CEO holding 51% of the company could just decide to pay himself a salary of several million $?

Sorry if that sounds very stupid, but where does one ever learn about that kind of things as a unsuspecting citizen? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!
Love it. Love it. Love it
Nice article.
Wrote it at YNET 4 years ago same subject, more reasons.
pitty you can't read hebrew :)
Why Friendships are Money -- FourStarters.com
You can go to http://www.majikwidget.com and use those. The absolute best way is to build your own however.
It's great to get a glimpse of how it works, but I was a little surprised to see how bulky the backpack machine is.

Could the justin setup eveolve to use something like the Gumstix "Way Smalls" computers -- http://www.gumstix.com/waysmalls.html -- instead?
I have two Spock invitations
Happy to send them to the first two people who email me at mattculbreth at gmail.com.
Very useful :)
Music Labels and Carriers Unite to Fight iPhone
Kyte: Deals with EMI & Nokia Announced, New Facebook Application
I looked into how it worked and found other things out.

Every page refers to /news.css. Since few HTTP headers are returned with /news.css, no caching is performed AFAICS anywhere between my browser and news.yc. So every page access makes the browser request /news.css again, doubling the number of hits.

Any unknown URL returns a HTTP 200 OK instead of, e.g. a 404, e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/standards_what_standards . This is seen by my browser when it requests a /favicon.ico. It tries twice, presumably because it isn't keen on the HTML response. That's twice per page access to news.yc. It can't learn there's no favicon because it gets a 200 back rather than a 404.

Sorting this out would just seem nice. Pretty trivial too, I'd have thought. At the moment every dynamic page access to view a thread is generating an extra three needless HTTP requests.
I sorta care about the spreadsheet modeling, but I'm really interested in the Flash frontend to the spreadsheet, which would really come in handy at my day job...
How To Learn From Your Father's Business Mistakes on Father's Day
If it's static, then you have no more worry than you would with any other javascript file. If it's dynamically generated, just be sure to escape any string delimiters in user-supplied data.
See the problem caused by /favicon.ico not returning 404 at the moment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28315
Paul, originally I heard "do no evil" as the motto, then after a bit it altered into the current "don't be evil". Was it ever the former or was that just Chinese whispers at the time? Personally, I prefer it.
MOOving product
Stanford robo-car tested for city driving skills
Business 2.0 vs. Valleywag
XSS exploit on Yahoo services... with included perl code
Stanford robot passes driving test (software: perception and decision-making - The algorithm will classify objects)
Looks like pair programming. I always found it to be a strange practice.
Facebook's app feeding frenzy (closing in on a saturation point?)
how do I know which 'mattculbreth' is from news.yc on spock? The only one not from myspace & has a linkedin account. I'm noticing spock at this time throws lots of false positives. So you have to read the source of the person (self entered or machine parsed) to gauge who is who.
_If you honestly believe that kids are well served by drinking a dozen spoonfuls of sugar every morning before school_

Nope. Nor pron. Nor warez.
How two Boston entrepreneurs are making millions from names as simple as chocolate.com
But a malicious proxy doesn't need to insert Javascript to get your browser to do naughty things, since it can just manipulate the upstream anyway. Not to mention inject Javascript into HTML pages as they come down.
Keeps people from wasting time on news sites.

Also: Do apple laptops not have external keyboard connections? Damn, guys, you're going to break your wrists off using laptop keyboards.
Don't issue 10 million shares just yet. Otherwise, I agree with the rest of lindsayrgwatt advice.

Since you're incorporating in Delaware, keep in mind that Delaware taxes are calculated based on the number of shares you authorize. You could end up paying tens of thousands of dollars in taxes (http://www.corp.delaware.gov/frtaxcalc.shtml).

I used incorporate.com and they cost about $200 or so for a Delaware corporation, and I would recommend them. If you're the sole owner then there is not much to worry about. After you incorporate, you can have your "accountant" look at the documents and tell you if you're missing something. They usually know how these things work. You don't necessarily need an attorney at this early stage.
What's with the downvotes? You guys think this guy is funny?
to (mis)quote reddit: facebook app or it didn't happen :).
Consulting Start-Up Looking for .NET Engineers
Quercus - PHP5 on the JVM
A License to Kode (the seeds of many problems are sown well before any lines of code)
Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise (IBM views on social bookmarking tools)
Dutch transit data locked up (how the EU database directive can thwart innovation)
Interview, Leo Chang of Clickshift (in world of component software, simplicity, not standards, might be the key)
Comments are more important than code (Jef Raskin)
The Joy of Spam (analysis of spam, measure, accept, love it?)
Will the Real Bots Stand Up? (prediction: EDSAC to iPod)
On a related note, http://news.ycombinator.com/news.css returns a MIME type of text/html instead of text/css like it should. This causes warnings to appear in this browser's console.