skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree wholeheartedly with the comments about simplicity.

I was recently watching a car video on the tube with a friend (http://youtube.com/watch?v=wJEx-xUHe94) and it reminded me of my personal goal to keep my web project simple.

In the video Jeremy Clarkson the host of top gear was reviewing the car, and what showed throughtout the video was how much he genuinely loved the car for its simiplicity. And car enthusiast can be one of the most hypercritical end consumers of a product especially when its missing features.

Rolls Royce certainly had the power to put any feature they wanted in the car, but what impressed the consumer was the discipline to keep it simple. And we've all had this effect on us on the web from using del.icio.us to google.

I've set the goal for my project to create such end consumer passion through simiplicty. And with any luck maybe I'll one day be able to afford the Phantom.
You are correct to note that it looks worse than it was in the context of your entire comment. I didn't want to repeat the whole comment here and I probably should have linked to it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41315).

But the fact of the matter is that ending a comment like that, no matter how thoughtful the rest of the comment, is highly confrontational. It distracts from the point you are making, damages the level of discourse on the thread, and in no way encourages the exchange of "opposing viewpoints".
Putting the menus either at the top or the left (or right or bottom) of a browser window won't do a thing to address the issue here, unless the user always maximizes their browser to fill their screen. In that case, flush left or right would be good from a Fitts' point of view. But most users don't use their browser this way.

You could consider enlarging your links and/or buttons so the hit space is larger. You could add a buffer zone around the hit space so if the user gets 'close enough' then that is equivalent to hitting the target. Space your hit spaces far enough apart so that users don't hit incorrectly. Run usability tests and time your users on common tasks, then iterate your design.

An important aspect of Fitts' law is minimizing the amount of movement the user has to do to get to the place they need to go to complete the next action in their task flow. Therefore you can cluster similar actions together so that the user doesn't have to move around the screen a lot to accomplish a given task.

An interesting part of Bruce's post was his mention of circular menus. Fitts' law tells us they'd be easier to use than linear menus. But usability, like so much else in life, is not so cut and dry. I would predict that the increased cognitive load that the user experienced when they saw a circular list of options rather than a linear one would slow them down so much as to outweigh the benefits of not having to move as much to get to their desired action. All things equal, circular menus may be more efficient than linear ones. However unless the whole world changes to circular menus - or at least, one whole computer environment, applications and OS included - introducing this in your application would slow your users down.
Would it make sense to have intentional lengthy downtimes to increase press coverage (assuming your service is popular enough for the press to care)?
Are You Ready To Bar Camp?
JazzScheme at lispvan
SchemaCrawler for PostgreSQL Announced
No because you piss off your users.
Learning JavaScript Programming Language through Video Lectures
John Resig - The Browser Scripting Revolution
what do you care if the fail?
its natural that not all investments are succesful. The investment/risk ratio is so low in YC's case, that it worths it to try different things.
You could argue that intelligent people is not enough to build a succesful company or turn a bad business idea into gold. Or you could argue that this could probably an indication of the "bubble" everyone except founders and invenstors, seems to be praising.
But beyond that, if you are not a music artist that feels this is bad for their work, which could turn out its not, then all you are going to gain is negative attitude from anyone.

by the way, i bet you are among the heaviest users of rapidshare. oh sry, that didn't sound really nice!
How REST won over WS-*
You're a freaking douche. Sure, Microsoft is no longer the empire it once was, but Mircosoft will still contain its presence in the computer world. Windows is becoming more and more similar to Macs. But Mac is still too specialized to be used for everyone. Why do you think Microsoft has power? Because anyone can use the system. Even a granny can use it now. So what? It makes it better in the marketing business. And having your applications on web based makes it only easier for hacking. The desktop mode or having applications that are on your system and not web based is a bit more safer. Linux is a good example. Each folder is encrypted and requires its own password to get into that folder or file. You probably already know this. But Microsoft has dug its own grave with the new Vista OS system. This totally ruins the great idea of open ended systems.Microsoft is becoming similar to Mac in the way its creating computers and hardware to become more closed ended. Mac has a backup file sytem when you delete a file you really want to delete it doesn't delete it but encrypts it. Thus space is never really cleaned out unless you unencrypt it.Plus most compatibilty with streaming video, games and smiliar media does not work with MAC. Macs are used for creating multimedia not running itI'm no Microsoft fan, but I appriecate your outlook that Microsoft has lost its influence, but your arguments don't really hold water. Think a bit.
haha, yeah i do, i'm a middleware guy though. The question is nothing to do with the company i work for.. honest! :)
appreciate the comment earlier. some of the more constructive feedback
how would you store the users data?
Sure, but maybe you'll gain more than you will lose.
I was thinking of comments like this

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41342

It's a bit much to call that an "opposing viewpoint." Opposing yes, but it has about one bit of content.
SCO Loses
Study users by letting them design your UI
4 Things I Hate about the Internet
It's scary, though...just think of the market shrinkage.
Facebook Source Code
I'm not sure those are examples of entrepreneurship as much as ruthless competitiveness. At least one of those defeats was proven to be done illegally. They're all over a decade old.

You ask Google, Apple, and Ubuntu whether Microsoft scares them.
I was expecting one of the four things to be myspace
Good to know, thanks. I guess in some places LLCs are still more like partnerships than corporations.
I personally liked anywhere.FM on first use. There may be other sites that provide the same features, but I don't know them.
My first instinct is to use the website to share my music with my brother who lives on another continent
Naw, I think Paul's bang on with this one. It's people throwing money at things they don't understand.

It they even get this vapourware off the ground, they'll run it like Bertelsmann ran Napster.
I actually was not. Whether or not you approve of MSFT's tactics, you really can't accuse them of not being able to respond to market challenges.
Google may not be scared of them, but I would personally rather take my chances against NBC (for example) than go head to head with MSFT.
Whoever you are, thank you. Could you suggest any good books on the VC process? I'd like to be prepared if we decide to go that route.
If you honestly don't think you'll have enough unplanned downtime and backlogs of e-mails anyway, you're mistaken.

Even more so when all you can say is "I took the server down just for attention" to your customers, users, investors, and the bloggers the next day.
No because it is not a sustainable means of growth. Not to mention that press coverage you are looking for will likely not come. Or when it does come, it will do more harm than good.
You're most welcome. The best entrepreneur's legal guide is called "Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law" published by Thompson / West Law written by Bagley and Dauchy. I bought it when I was doing my first start-up and I'm sure they have an updated version. I just found one at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Entrepreneurs-Guide-Business-Law/dp/03...

In general, I think too many young entrepreneurs give up too much equity too quickly because they fall for the "oh we're making the pie bigger so giving us a huge percentage is fine" fallacy.

There are so many things to take into account when taking VC money. Too many VC firms replace young CEOs quickly at which point the founders get heavily diluted. Also be careful of VCs that try to reserve too large of a pool for management they want to recruit.

Management team members recruited by your VC work for the VC, not for you, the CEO. When push comes to shove, they will side with the VC because they know the VC will find them another job if your start-up goes bust.

The golden rule of VCs is this: He who has the gold makes the rule.
I guess you could hold a contest where users have to both submit their design ideas and vote on what they like, and giving a prize to those whose ideas you use; acceptance of which indicates they agree that you're allowed to use their ideas.
Paul, it's funny how you choose to pick out areas to attack while you totally ignore my arguments in other areas. It really fascinates me how you just ignore certain arguments conveniently.

As to your response, to IPO a business requires a lot of revenue. Many of the businesses that YC are spinning out don't seem to have a revenue model. They may come up with one, but given a typical VC firm's portfolio duration, it doesn't seem likely that they will come up with a revenue model AND hit the revenue milestones required to go public.

Of course it's in your "interest" to have YC companies go public but that's a very low-probability scenario; far lower than the probability that a regular early-stage VC firm's portfolio companies will go public.

I would be interested to see the reasoning that could lead to an IPO for even 25% of YC companies.
Texty: Dead Simple Content Creation And Editing
Many of your comments have a similar level of content. Hypocrisy doesn't help you win arguments.
One more reason to stay a subchapter S Corporation if you don't need to raise VC money:

- There is a special election you can make when you sell the company that allows you to sell the assets instead of the equity which is something you can get the acquirer to pay more for because they can get a stepped up basis at market value and then depreciate it to create tax savings.

I don't remember the exact research, but I believe subchapter S corporations that undertake the election sell for 10% more than companies that cannot or do not take the election with all other things being equal.
Proper use of the English language might help you make your argument which is rather convoluted and weak.

It's fair to be a Devil's advocate to serve two functions:

1. Limit hype
2. Hope that the intelligent folks on the other end take this into account and figure out a real business model.

FYI, I don't use rapidshare at all.
Why Is Hollywood Making A Sequel To The Napster Wars?
I don't understand how this counts as a response to PG's last post. Of course 25% of YC companies aren't going to IPO, PG didn't say that. He just said that's the best possible scenario.

You've gotta remember that Paul is doing this YC thing for personal fulfillment more than anything. He's not making an enormous amount of money and he's investing all of his time.
I'm claiming that you can't pretend that your goal is an IPO when that's not even realistic. It's faking a dilemma when the only real exit opportunity for YC companies is through an early acquisition for technology/talent. You can't have a "late acquisition" or IPO when you don't generate money.
I'd bet most VC firms don't have successful IPOs with even 5% of their portfolio. What's your point? Most IPOs also happen 5+ years into a company's life so it's a bit early to call it for YC. You're also ignoring the biggest part of the YC thinking: It's harder to make something people want than it is to generate revenue once you have. See: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Reddit, PlentyOfFish, Flickr, TechCrunch, Google, Yahoo, ...

I think you can debate this stuff just as well without the adversarial tone. Although this subject is like beating a dead horse most people here don't mind discussing it rationally.
I completely agree with you that most VC firms have very few successful IPOs.

Is it really harder to make something people want than it is to generate revenues once you have?

It's easy for you to find a few examples, but I could name 1000 social networking/bookmarking sites that are useful but can't generate revenues.
Brett - that is a fair point. I will try to avoid such usage.
If YC stays around for a very long time, which seems to be PG's plan, as t->infinity there will be an IPO. Perhaps it is unlikely to happen anytime soon, but why would he strive for something not as good?
you seem not to know then, that an advocate tries to have everyone on their side when making an argument, contrary to the choice of words you are continuesly making that are driving off anyone to even answer to your low level excuses!

Your arguments seem to be surrendered in abstractness leading to lack of usefulness of these, for any contructive dialog or providing the least help to the founders, and yourself to the incompetence of answering to the essence of mine, which arguments seem to really annoy you, thus accusing my use of the english language for your ridicilus attitude, before and now!
Yes. Cut the tone, mr. weeblyrocks. Does it make you feel better about yourself?
Was Dell.com hacked just a bit so most wouldn't notice?  How would you detect that?
If you visit www.dell.com/smb , you will see that Dell proudly states that they're the #1 PC of Choice in the US? (with a question mark.)

Google's cache shows a + at the end, instead of a question mark. Since this is an image file, and not text, how do you propose this happened? Surely, it's supposed to say ".. in the US*".
If you visit http://www.dell.com/smb , you will see that Dell proudly states that they're the #1 PC of Choice in the US? (with a question mark.)

Google's cache shows a + at the end, instead of a question mark. Since this is an image file, and not text, how do you propose this happened? Surely, it's supposed to say ".. in the US+". The + reference still exists at the bottom of the live page...
That will only further the cause of the Google's-A-Monopoly bandwagon.
There are a lot of hackers that are never caught. My credit card was stolen from what I think must be an online store that no one noticed had customer information stolen.. He bought three anonymous web proxy accounts with my CC on David Rusenko's non-Weebly company, in a weird coincidence.
Useful != Want. There's a lot of objectively more-useful things in this world that people don't want for various reasons.

Making something people want is the first hard step. Growing it into something big is usually just a matter of determination and time. I'll bet those 1,000 sites are lacking in one of these areas.

Can you name any site that has attracted lots of people with something they want and can't make money?
No. Almost certainly what happened is that the image was being regenerated after being edited, and the dagger character (the + with a long tail) used was missing from the font on the system in question. Replacing a missing glyph with a question mark is a standard thing to do, on the basis that it's something people usually notice when proofreading... but unfortunately it isn't quite so obvious when the missing character occurs at the end of a sentence.

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence, particularly where proofreading is concerned.
Napster, but that wasn't their fault
Obviously they haven't launched, but you can imagine that a video dating site is a lot like OKCupid, except everyone has the capability of sending video messages and doing live video chats. They also get to sell webcams, for those that don't have them.
And already nuked. I'm impressed with how quickly Facebook reacted. That was only three hours ago!
This is what happened, from a similar post:

http://www.theecotone.com/2007/08/10/facebook-code-dump/

Just to be clear, apart from embarrassment, I'm sure the reason to react quickly is for security reasons. It's not that they're worried about their technology, like if a major game's source code was leaked. Facebook could be written in Visual Basic and Lego Mindstorm programs -- who cares? Their code is just whatever it needs to be.
should these projects succeed the resulting effect upon
the web development industry will be incalculable

Some coders will use Python instead of Javascript. Users wont even notice. "Revolution" might be a bit overstated.
Facebook Homepage Code
"A stock-picking community?" Worthio two-point-oh?
Of course :) I'm not sure why people claim code needs to be pretty. I'd rather have something functional than something pretty, all things being equal (I've heard Netscape's code was very pretty right around the time their company went under). Sure, it's higher quality, but not always worth the time.

Speaking of code.. Back to my community site.
Two thoughts: First of all, I'm a Python fan, and would like to use it client-side. But the truth is that ECMAScript ain't that bad, it's just a little strange. I'm not at all convinced that it's a huge win to use Python over ECMAScript, although I'd choose to, given the opportunity.

Secondly, this is cool, but if it depends on users installing a plug-in to IE for anything to happen, it's unlikely to amount to much. I don't see devs using anything (except Flash) that forces their users to choose between installing something (scary!) or going to another site.
Supermarket 2.0 - Web2.0 Parody (vid)
you could just remember it yourself! creating the ultimate live web 2.0, where once a user enters a username and password, you actually have to verify it at that exact moment or else they can't login! then you could hire midgets and have them remember and rebuild profiles for people and unicorns and...

anyways, i thought most (simple) desktop apps store data in text files? (perhaps encrypted?) it's definitely possible to store data in text files for web apps but seems inefficient for many reasons - speed and scalability being the first that come to mind. i've stored data in text files before for very simple apps that contained a couple of fields and had no sensitive information.

my personal suggestion: go with MySQL. it's free, well documented, efficient, scalable, etc. the list goes on...
Yea, that only took like 3 hours. Someone had to log on at 11:30 on a Friday to send out that email...now that's job dedication.
Ditto to that, I'm a fan of Notepad++ and Firebug myself. I find I reuse very little CSS when designing sites nowadays anyways. (blue jays, bays, lays, days)

For those that don't know Firebug: http://www.getfirebug.com/
imaginary, since I don't have an office job.
Why do you hate it? It would be better to monetize it somehow.
Actually, I similarly believe it was likely automatically recreated by a web app; and, since it's non-obvious, no employee has questioned it--but your insight is exactly what I was hoping for. I wanted to read some interesting thought processes from YC users, exactly like that, but couldn't think of a better way to relate it to startup news at the time.
From what I read, non-US citizens/residents can't take part in S-corps, and since I am physically located in Europe, should I ever want to partner up with someone and include them in the company, perhaps it would be easier with the LLC. It also seemed like a slightly lower hassle way of doing things. I could be wrong, but in the end, after doing my reading, I just picked one and got on with it.
You can be the sole owner of an LLC.
Save Time With Development Templates
This resource is for web masters who often create small projects.
A Tool for Digg Submitters
The private beta starts in a few more days. If you submit stories to Digg.com and like getting to the front page, then you will want to play with this.
Can you find even one example of a comment of mine that merely disses someone without offering some justification?
Google Is Closing Its Video Retailing Operation
Man what's all the fuss about FB's source code? although I did learn a thing or two by reading it hehe :-)
All sorts of failed Web 1.0 companies were seemingly in this category. Webvan, Kozmo, etc. However, that is not to say if they had been operated differently they may not have made money.

In Web 2.0, it is probably too early to tell, but I suspect there are plenty of types of applications that most consumers just won't pay for and that still don't make that much money in advertising. As a result they may attract lots of people with something they want and can't make money. An example might online calendars, a la kiko. Bookmarking seems to be another. Again, though, it is too early to tell for sure. What I think will happen in these cases, is you will get Google & Yahoo offering them for free as loss leaders for their other products. I guess we'll see.
Here's another: http://www.amazon.com/Term-Sheets-Valuations-Intricacies-Ven...
I believe LLCs also have this property (or something similar where a stepped-up basis can be achieved for the buyer).
Heh, that store was fairly suffocating for a Web2.0 supermarket. I was expecting something more like an Apple store.
I'm learning Javascript just to make a web app. There is nothing hard about it, with lots of resources available. Already knowing Python & Ruby makes things easier for me.

But if people only need to know Python, then web apps will become that much easier to make. I think this is related to the trend for smaller/lighter companies.

More people will think small and make startups if you don't need to know as much to make good applications. Lowering the number of languages needed to make an application would be a significant step in that direction. And making that language Python, which many would agree is one of the easiest languages to learn, will make it that much easier.
Q&A: Jonathan Schwartz on Sun's open-source business strategy
"Even more so when all you can say is "I took the server down just for attention" to your customers, users, investors, and the bloggers the next day."

Think of all the additional press coverage you'd get if you said that, though!
Sure, keep it in mind, but be keep in mind the tradeoffs that might be necessary to focus on i18n and globalization rather than features.
"The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one's career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity -- taking more swings at the bat -- is much higher payoff than trying to improve one's batting average."

Of all the conclusions, this one threw me off quite a bit. I realize Marc is going to be following this article up with a part 2, but I d be interested to see just how a "swing at the bat" is defined in the start-up context. If a swing is defined as one iteration, then seeing no "systematic developmental trends" in the "quality ratio" goes very much against the grain. I would argue that every iteration teaches us something that is quite applicable in the "general" sense to future iterations (for different products/services and across markets).

In any case, even if this conclusion is considered in a non-startup context, its still very bothersome. For example, if a "swing at the bat" is defined as one complete work, such as a Book or a Musical Piece, why arent there developmental trends in the quality ratio?
Five Points to Consider before Expanding Internationally
if major browsers can't standardize on a single language, what is the chance of standardizing on a dozen of them?

seriously, if that guy's family name did not sound like "Lessig", nobody would bother to read it.