skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the "productivity comes in spurts" sentiment. I typically have about 2-4 hours of real productive brain chemistry per day--where my mind is conducive to creating something, or solving something. This usually comes in the morning for me. The rest of the day, I spend reading/exchanging info with other people--which all ends up getting assimilated into my work somehow, after a good sleep.
You do better at programming when you enjoy the task, and working on your own ideas helps that tremendously. So yeah, go start your startup.
I don't understand facebook :-( From Germany, it seems completely unusable. OK, after some searching I found a group called "Germany" to join. Cool - that should be really useful...

The design of Facebook sucks, too (in my opinion).
And how to determine the position in the search results, also by hand?
Xinu: More Stats For Any Site
Xinu is a service that provides a comprehensive overview of page statistics and data that leaves cookie-cutter sites such as Popuri for dead.
Stupid things big companies do
execute and repeat.
Sharing the Widget Wealth
Widgets jazz up profiles and boost traffic, but eat into social networks' ad revenue. Facebook and others ponder a remedy
Unfortunately it seems that Xinu's site is down at this point. I tried Popuri just now and they both seem like mashups of screenscraping/public api content. Not too hard to do, but still interesting.

Both of these sites seem somewhat parasitic: they exclusively use other people's content. Are these other sites really benefitting from their data being used like this?

Not really sure what those kanji mean together. Taking the characters' individual meanings I'd make up something like "inside the letter", but its probably idiomatic Chinese and means something completely different.
Does anyone know of a web app for personal relationship management?
I'm reading Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi (not a great book, but highlights the importance of sustaining relationships) and I'm trying to find something online to help me with what will be an incredibly tedious task if I don't.

I know about Plaxo and LinkedIn, but neither does quite what I want. I need something that lets me keep track of when I last spoke to someone and lets me tag people as being in different categories (i.e. business contact, old friend, acquaintance, etc.).

Anyone know of something out there that can do this?
Wow, this is one of the coolest things I've seen in awhile. Nice work!
Ever heard of ACT! (exclamation point is part of it): http://www.act.com/?

Not sure they have a web app, but they are one of many popular software apps that accomplish what you are talking about. I remember having ACT! 2.0 in the mid-90s.

I'm looking at their site and I don't see a web app, though I'm not sure and I think it would absolutely crazy if they didn't.
Here it is: http://www.act.com/products/web/, but it still doesn't look like simply the personal version just on the Web.
Discover Software Releases!
If you love software get this: Beta Marker gives you power to Download Hottest free ware or Shareware and Discover Cool New Software! Beta Marker is about keeping track of software you like and about discovering new software. It revolutionizes software rating by shifting the power to the community of software lovers. So now, in the sea of new software, the screening is done for you.
Try highrise by 37signals.
I've been puttering around on a Facebook app to do this kind of thing. I've been wanting to make private notes and the like about people on there. I have a horrible memory sometimes and it'd be really nice to have a place to jot things down. I don't think it's overly marketable since most of my Facebook 'friends' are real friends and not many are business colleagues. If you're interested let me know and I'll push it live in the next few days.
Find a startup co-founder
A site for finding co-founders:
http://www.cofoundr.com

You can search members by skills, interests and location or "pitch your idea" to recruit folks.
Do you have a link to this, ahem, "engaging" paraphrase?
In all the startups I've worked at, there actually was one uber-hacker who worked 80 hours a week. There were also a lot of guys who spent 75 hours a week in meetings and farting around on the internet, and 5 hours doing useful work. I've been both of those guys at different startups.

The myth comes from back in the days when there was a lot of code to be written. Certain projects, like games, have TONS of code. Even the sharpest programmer can only type so fast, and even the fastest compiler can only compile so fast. The only way for projects like that to come to fruition in any reasonable amount of time is for people to work long hours.

The nature of software startups has changed. With web apps, the code base is relatively small and simple. There usually isn't a compile cycle. What happens now, is you spend all your time on systems administration issues. Shit breaks, you need to respond to it immediately. I sort of miss the days where programming 70 hours a week was an option. Now I'm lucky to get in 20 hours of programming in between the 100 hours backlog of systems administration that needs to get done.
is this advice for relationships or companies?
The concept was not a fad. The concept was an advance which has lived on in other browsers.

With imagination perhaps, one could even apply the paradigm of a browser to mechanical and biological domains ("non-computing" in a software sense).

concepts vs. tools for strategic business and market advantage
Does anyone else think this guy is a little crazy? =D
I'm not impressed. Is there an equivalent list of YC companies?
Yeah, I have the same problem...I need this more for people that aren't on Facebook. A FB platform act like this would probably incredibly useful in like 10 years once most of a person's contacts are using online social networks, but the business world is still run by non-Facebookers, fortunately or unfortunately.
Millionaires Cash Out Of California
PG, you wrote the following some time back:

> What it takes is the right people. If you could get the right ten thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo would become Silicon Valley. (http://paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html)

If the millionaires are really moving out of CA, shouldn't this herald the move of a silicon valley type startup atmosphere to the city or cities millionaires are moving?
I'm actually working on one: http://muchcloser.com.

It's definitely not ready for prime time yet and I'm looking for a co-founder(s). (Who knows maybe we can submit to the YCombinator winter application...)

I'm still debating whether I should keep user registration open since it's not polished enough to mass market...

Let me know what you guys think.
hmm not sure... I think if millionaires are moving out, it doesn't mean entrepreneurs are
Salesforce.com or any other CRM product should do something similar to this. Back in the day we used ACT! or GoldMine to do it.

I wonder if you could use a gmail API (is there one?) to divine this info automatically?
Open Source Venture Investment Through Q1 of 2007
A Patent Is Worth Having, Right? Well, Maybe Not
Thanks, this is almost exactly what I was looking for. I should have known to check 37signals ;)
I think this is great area to build something in. Highrise is good, but it's geared more towards CRM than PRM.

I think you've got the right idea from the cursory look I took at your site. The UI needs a bit of work, but I'm sure you'll get to that at some point. I really like the "smart reminders" feature. It's too easy to forget about your acquaintances, and sending an unexpected greeting is a great way to keep up the relationship.
> With web apps, the code base is relatively small and simple

Well said, this is having enormous impacts in the economy of web 2.0 too. Not just small, but also simple as you said. This means that almost every decent programmer can write it, so most startups have success just for a matter of feeling, community, user interface and user experience in general.

I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing: from one side it is not very meritocratic as to be very smart with the code and design of complex systems is not the sole road to the success.

On the other hand this is probably the first stage in the history where small groups of people that sometimes lack a strong programming background (in favor of other kind of background) are writing software used by a lot of users, this can be an interesting human experiment.

Just a possibly stupid question: is it possible that the web 2.0 is subtracting hackers from more long-term important work because everybody is busy writing simple web apps instead of the next google or alike?
Yeah that's why I made Muchcloser. There are a lot of CRMs and Facebooks, but at this point in my life I already have tons of friends and I have more than enough tools to help me in my professional life...

yeah the UI really needs major work (tough to cover everything being a one man army)...

which leads me to a more important point: if you or anyone else is interested in helping me build something you want to use, just send me an email through the site (contact us) and we'll see if it's a good fit (locale, skills, ...)
Getting a lesson in retail inside world's busiest Costco
Simplicity vs. Feature Creep: I Love It, It's Perfect, Now It Changes
If it's just tax evasion they may still be living and doing business there. A Wyoming millionaire can invest in a California company.
Why We Rank #1 for 'John Chow' and Why You Shouldn't Mess With Google
If you came to this article looking for ways to "Make Money Online", you came to the right place. If you were searching for John Chow, and ended up here you must be wondering how we are the first result and if it makes sense.
excellent article on patents and the need for change in the process
Well it was enough to cause him to email me about it :)
Five lessons in viral marketing
How do you handle accounts with facebook and non-facebook versions of your service?
To make it as easy as possible, registration should be automatic for facebook users.

But what happens for the non-facebook version? How can users use the same account in both the facebook and non-facebook versions?
I donno if I'd take any of his advice but I like him. He's cool. :)
http://paulgraham.com/essay.html
"... More or less content-free blog post ..."

James, how?

I can see a couple of good messages here. The first, in a market where there is a lack of lead developers. It shows one path, that one person took to get the knowledge & tools needed to create a product. The second is the "where are all the chick developers? ... they can't handle, 'tech stuff', etc ..." needs to be put into proper context. They are around if you care to look & seem to be doing an ok job ~ http://pownce.com/
Remember InviteShare?  Sold for $25,000!
I use CiviCRM. It may not be perfect for you, as you seem to have decided on Highrise, but CiviCRM is perfect for me. Integrating it into my existing sites is a breeze.

http://civicrm.org/
There may be an official list somewhere, but Wikipedia has a decent list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator#Portfolio
After that, I think you should buy Facebook.
I'm sure you're familiar with Kurzweil and his love of fitting lines on logarithmic plots.
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/Blog_Kurzweil.gif

He has an interesting plot where he takes a number of opinions about the most important events ever (e.g. fire, farming, etc.), and plots them all on a logarithmic time plot. The line fit to the 20 or so opinions is very apparent.
If I was a potential buyer I'd see someone selling a site just 4 days after launch as a big red flag. Was the developer's confidence in it's potential so low that they chose to take a sum equivalent to 4 months' salaray (assuming they're not 16) rather than ride the wave?

On the other hand, maybe they're on to something - repeatedly build sites with cool design, get a mention on Tech Crunch, and flip.
7 Reasons to Get Away To Unleash Your Best Ideas
To a certain extent, we should have expected this for some time. An introduction to economics will teach you about productivity. Clearly, sending a tractor back 1000 years would do wonders for local productivity. The boost from the marginal US tractor would be orders of magnitude smaller.

This is pretty obvious.

What isn't obvious is why the developing world grows so slowly in spite of the multitude of available improvements from the first world. The article mentions looking for 20% growth in some countries. Is that really a high number considering people in the US is 40X richer than Eritrea?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...

Increasing freedom is important here, clearly. Increased ease of communication must be playing a roll.

One thing I've never understood is why it seems people don't try to make much money off of the poorest 5B people. If you tap that market, the growth potential is ginormous. This reminds me of an excellent article about design for the world's poor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/science/29cheap.html?ex=11...
Not relevant to the article but, I've got a piece of user interface I want to patent - sure patents are evil but the underlying tech is kind of easily deducible / re-creatable once seen (it's a human-aided optimization system, the method of human interaction is obviously on display). So I feel I need that protection to even show it to anyone. Again not too relevant but, does anyone have experience with protecting 'fragile' tech?
Critical Marketing Activites For A Startup
_cool design_

I beg to differ.
Don't make your users register. At least not to just access information.
Well, if you don't think much of their design, you could try it with a cool design, and see if you can double their take. ;-)
we're building it now
In the last comment on the Sitepoint auction, the creator mentions that he earned $30 from Google ads. While this is during (probably) a peak in traffic due to all the buzz around his site, let's assume he averages $50/day from Google ads. Unless he comes up with a solid revenue model, gets some sponsors or his site takes off even more, he'd be making around $1500/month.

Selling for $25,000, on the other hand, could allow him to invest in another more promising idea. All that aside, I'm still not sure if I'd do what he has done.
still in the UK?
I don't think that's the case. Due to exponential population growth, the majority of humans that have ever lived are still alive, so it would seem to be a natural hypothesis that most of the progress that has ever been made has been made in the past century.
To be fair, I didn't investigate ... but who needs 15k and office space to build a sticky note facebook app? Secondly, Didn't the facebook platform launch after the techstars deadline?
I didn't catch any critical marketing activities in the article, it read more like an ad for "marketing is everything."
Agreed. If you're in a startup, it's good to spend a little effort now and then looking at this sort of news since occasionally you'll learn something relevent to what you're doing.
This can be a full time job in itself, but here are some quickies I like:

If you want to be practical, Hack The Planet is worth a glance every now and then: http://wmf.editthispage.com

Lambda the Ultimate is good too, especially if you think languages are where the real CS action is: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/
Dear Lumber yard
Dear Sirs,

I write to solicit; we sell termites. We provide termite adoption services for lumberyards.

While termite adoption may sound terrible at first blush, we believe it to be adviseable. The termites can dispose of wracked beams without requiring burning. The termites can also eliminate small pieces of discarded wood, and partly take care of cleaning the sawing site in your stead. They can also easily consume stockpiles that are no longer useful. This may be especially valuable in sight of the housing downturn in your area and subsequent inventory surpluses you may be dealing with. Any surplus inventory you give to the termites will largely be metabolized by the termites, and therefore decrease in volume. From a practical point of view, a termite nest can perform in your lumber yard the task it performs in nature; that of a recycler. At this point you can exploint the large amount of fertilizer left over and sell it.

You are in a position at which you can begin to sell natural fertilizer easily. Consumers relate your core business to fixing homes. You provide beams for home improvement purposes, and while that segment of the housing market is falling, the gardening market is holding up because desperate sellers will try to improve the curb appeal of their house in order to finally sell their house. This means home sellers are improving their gardens, which involves the use of fertilizer. As the housing downturn has affected your core business for the worse, why not hedge these losses by entering the fertilizer market?

Not only will termites reduce costs and expand your business, they will also provide excellent public relations. Ecology is in these days; Whole Foods can charge about twice the usual price for its products solely because they are organic. This despite any evidence the food the sell is actually better in any way. Many consumers may want to reduce their carbon footprint. By buying your fertilizer, they effectively stop about half of the carbon in a plank from reaching the atmosphere. This will provide cheap and novel marketing for both your core business and your fertilizer business.

We'll be the first to acknowledge that termites pose a serious risk to wood. They can devastate a home if left unattended for a few years. A simple "moat" around the termite's designated space will be able to effectively stop the termites from harming the good wood. In doing so, you will showcase your expertise in handling lumber and the confidence you have in your abilities. You may be able to sell termite control sprays in the process.

At Intermite, we believe adopting a nest will be an excellent way to help your core lumber business. For an up-front set-up fee of $449.00, we offer the delivery and installation and setup of a termite nest in your lumberyard.

A nest costs $450.00 plus tax. This fee includes includes delivery and installation. We offer related products such as custom fertilizer bags,

Regards,
Intermite
I had fun writing this.
The Facebook lawsuit that hasn't gone away (from HarvardConnect.com)
Is that image from the facebook "Places I've Been" App?
I heard somewhere that the glaze lipstick that Monica Lewinsky wore for a 1999 TV interview was discontinued, so women clamor for it on eBay.
Bug Alert:

Once I uploaded the image into my profile, I cannot change it. It does not matter what I do: remove an existing image and upload new one, rename files before uploading, in the end, my profile shows the image I uploaded first time, regardless of what I try to upload now.
The Power of the Marginal
While I think InviteShare provides a useful service and could gather a community, I think it would be difficult for someone to easily make a full-time business out of it on its own.

$25,000 for what likely could have been a handful of days work is an excellent payout, and possibly a great way to fund their next startup ;]
I'm interested in who bought it. Was it an SEO/domainer/spammer guy?
That's an excellent question. I was also just wondering who the new owner was since it's listed as 'Private' on the auction site.
Could the YC model have existed in the late 90's?
ACT! is a POS!
In this case I'm not sure that's a bad idea.

- This is, or should be, a very motivated audience.

- The point of the site is as much advertising yourself as seeking a cofounder as searching the current offers.

- The data you enter when you register is pretty much the search criteria for cofounders.
but why are they using tapefailure? are they checking out what users type into the forms?
Why Login/Register?
Sign an NDA with everyone who you share the idea with?

I have an NDA drawn up you can have if you want it, email me.
Yes, but they would have needed to invest more money to cover software and servers. Open source has come a long way since then.
just occured to me - almost everybody do at least one startup per life
The start up that almost one do at least once per life is FAMILY:

-- starting with a low budget and wild emotions
-- aiming at growth and public purpose
-- changing its course as life goes on
-- always focused on whats critical
-- totally commited

No less than 2 co founders needed :)
Unless I'm badly mistaken, that site's much more than just a handful of days work.
VC Adventure: Monday morning (interesting postmortem on Startup Weekend)
Inside Facebook, NFO (News Feed Optimization) is the new SEO
I was thinking about this analogy this weekend because my niece was over. It sure seems like having a toddler is certainly on par in terms of work with doing a startup.
According to most estimates the nr. of people who have ever lived is around 100 billion. People alive today are between 6 and 7 billion.
Paul Graham, Kevin Rose & Om Malik added FOWA line-up
The Dangers of Building on the Facebook Platform
Everybody with a website knows that Google owns two of their most important marketing channels: organic search (SEO) and paid search (SEM).
Please, no more LinkedIn invites ("get yourself onto Facebook if you wish to grab my attention")
Tech funds thrive, but reasons elusive
Could one reason be the emergence of web 2.0?
Toyota's TPS applied to a whole country: Lean Economic Development Strategy
Succinctness is power -- http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html -- probably the best article for a language designer. Not only succinctness is power, it turns out to be the most important quality of a good programming language. The rest is a matter of taste, I think.
Emerging web 2.0 design trends
The high-stakes debate over wireless open access
Security Bites Podcast: Ajax insecurity
The Washington Post to Trade in Hyperlocal News on the Web
It's no secret: Facebook's allure is its privacy
Knitting site attracts 17,000 without "any marketing to speak of"
Oh. I seriously thought that its allure was a mix of voyeurism and exhibitionism.
Is it bad if I don't want to work at a C++/Java startup?
I have an opportunity to work at a company coming in as employee# < 10. They are doing so well that they are already profitable after a year and trying to keep up with the demand. I think I would really like working there, except that they use C++/Java. I want to accomplish as much as possible in my life, and coding memory management in C++ or otherwise being limited to unexpressive languages just seems to prevent that goal.
Systems Admin TELL ME ABOUT IT sigh I spend so much time configuring and restarting my VPS it's...too...painful...to..do... and I find myself missing coding so much more after hours upon hours of system admin work.
The article wasn't completely clear about where these millionaires are actually living. One client saved nearly 100K/year by declaring a primary residence in another state (Wyoming). Does that actually mean he/she lives there?

Another thing - almost anyone who bought a modest house in a nice neighborhood in most of the bay area, los angeles, san diego, santa barbara... more than 15 years ago is probably a millionaire on paper. I have a feeling a lot of these millionaire cash outs are retirees tapping home equity.

But are high tech entrepreneurs, flush with a mil from their first success, eager to leave silicon valley and resettle in Wyoming? Seriously doubt it.
Startup Marketing: Big Bang vs. Darwinian Evolution
If you really want to accomplish as much as possible in your life, you could start by throwing out your prejudices. Computer languages aren't religions, they're tools, get over it.
I particularly liked this challenge: "Think of five startups that you really admire and that you think were big hits. Now, do some quick research and figure out how much time/energy they spent on a big-bang launch to "release" their product to the world."