skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it's really annoying to be shopping for an airline ticket, make a significant amount of requests (10-20) with different parameters (dates, airports, etc) only to see your first quote rise when enter it again :-/.
Let's hope it'll happen in 5 years, not 15.
I think it's also much easier to zing off a facile negative comment. Forcing yourself to write something positive (or at least non-negative) helps me focus on writing something truly insightful.
Jaed: Great suggestion, I think we will implement that idea, thanks

Zach: It's actually just an issue with flash on OSX i believe, but we're looking into how to fix that now, thanks :D

Vuknje: If you grab the blue bar just above the playlist, you can resize the playlist to your liking :)

Staunch: Actually if you check out our Net100 Channel ( http://chime.tv/#net100/ ) it combines the top videos from digg, mefi, youtube etc all in one place!

Thanks for the kind words Mkull and Mdolon
That equally describes pre-web apps like word processors and spreadsheets.
I think it is worth fixing.

The only thing Yahoo still has working for them is the huge consumer base. Some small startups with a fraction of Yahoo's size are also able to charge for services and have revenue sources beyond advertising. A service for which Yahoo users(consumers not businesses) are willing to pay, is there one? Maybe Yahoo needs to be in the same space as PayPal, they have the perfect consumer base(trust and penetration) to action something that facilitates micro-payments. The goal should be to make it as ubiquitous as a yahoo email address was in the past.

The problem isn't going to be solved by bringing in management folks, Yahoo needs a technology upgrade. They haven't done anything amazing for quite some time now - Yahoo is a fairly old company. Not enough hackers graduating from college have Yahoo on the top of their list.

PS: I know they do hosting and other stuff but that isn't a significant contributor to their revenue.
VideoEgg: From zero to 25 million videos per day
The difference, as I see it, is that the value in the "social/web2.0" site comes mostly from the community (almost entirely in cases like reddit), rather than the application having much inherent value itself, as word processors and spreadsheets (or phone lines) clearly do.

I guess people get enough value out of it to not worry too much, but there is something to the original quote.
Phone lines are as neutral as reddit. They just cost a lot more to install. So if that's the critical difference, then the above remark about web 2.0 reduces to: it's cheaper now to start a startup.
Curious gadget fans smash, dissect iPhones
Heck, I was in the Store the other day trying it out, and even likebetter.com (my app) works, and it hardly works in Safari on a mac! Me = Amazed
Use the Best of Craigslist to Balance Work/Relationships
Top 25 Web Apps for the iPhone
"You Tube is responsible for about 10% of all internet traffic."

What? This can't be true.
VideoEgg's deal-making reminds me of the early days of VA Linux and Redhat. At that time, I thought customers would like VA being a single source of hardware and software, avoiding any finger-pointing between vendors when problems arose. I thought for that reason they would do better than Redhat. I was wrong. Redhat's deal-making put them way ahead, until VA finally had to change the business model.
Meta-Feature Request: Release the interpreter and source to news.yc so that we can implement Markdown, fix the &foo; conversion to not happen on the server-side, and fix the multibyte encoding problems. :-)
I agree in general about open-mindedness and exploring a variety of subjects. My favorite articles are almost never from valleywag or techcrunch. But I do think news.yc should stay as startup-focused as possible.

You're probably familiar with it, but I'd recommend programming.reddit.com. You'll get a much better variety of computer science and programming articles than you will here.
I still say Web 3.0 is when users are directly involved in the creation of web apps. That and increasingly intuitive 3d interfaces.

(Usability will also 'come into its own,' and find itself as an art and science, I believe.)
Usually on the web people prefer to give away their PRIVACY for free services. That privacy is in turn converted into advertising.

(This will all change very soon, when people are ready to start paying for a higher - and much more private and secure - level of premium service. You know, the Web will evolve to resemble the "regular' economy more and more, I believe..)
My guess is that, eventually, super-rich startup founders will evolve an equally advanced model for public philanthropy:

PHILANTHROPY 2.0

It's an idea whose time has come.
Yahoo launches customizable ad tool (SmartAds system tailored to age, gender, location and online activities.)
mike at mentalitygroup.com
What they need is an innovation upgrade-- the list of failures of innovation and indecisive product strategy in that article is frightening.

Yahoo needs to look farther into the future and start making some longer-term bets, both in product development and acquisitions. Their market position makes true innovation difficult, though, and they might have to sacrifice the stability of the mid/mass-market, where they've had (albeit lukewarm) success, in order to gain competitive advantage against Google.

Has anyone heard about how well Caterina Fake is doing with the Brickyard initiative? Maybe more of the company's overall strategy should come out of that unit.

Overall, though, Yahoo needs a really solid breakthrough in ad-serving technology-- so much of their money comes from content/ad-serving partnerships with other properties, and a real ad-serving advantage will enable them to deliver a lot more value on those partnerships. YPN is a good start, but it only moves the ball forward a smidge.
This article got me thinking...how would I get to work with Richard Feynman? Going to MIT or Caltech would help. Not necessarily those actual places that matters, but being at a place that attracts passionate and smart like-minded individuals. That way, you can learn from them and expose yourself to different ideas.

The other point is probably to be working on an interesting problem. Nothing swarms geeks like an interesting problem.

As an aside, it's funny that Feynman didn't mind painting walls just because he was a Nobel winner. When I make it, I wish to keep the same attitude. Any help helps.

It's too bad that Thinking Machines didn't stay afloat. I've seen videos of evolutions virtual creatures by Karl Sims. http://www.genarts.com/karl/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
Zero to Startup: Prerequisites
I'm moonlighting, and I have to say - it's brutal. I get a couple of nights a week to work on my startup project, and it sucks: a) it's not nearly enough time, b) I totally lose flow, c) I'm tired before I start, and so have really motivation trouble.

Many a-list bloggers say it's really not an ideal approach - and they're right.

That said, I have no choice. I have a wife & 2 kids, and not that much money in the bank right now. So my choices are either moonlighting or give up the startup dream, which I absolutely refuse to do. (Which reminds me: all that stuff about the tech industry being a complete meritocracy, you can start a startup on no money, etc. - that's all just crap. There's no meritocracy. You can only launch a startup if you - or someone else (your daddy, etc.) has enough money to pay all your bills while you do it. That rules out: working class people, middle class people with kids, etc.)

Anyway, my goal is to work enough to just get something launched, and then hope it takes off from there enough to transition to it full time. It's a long tough road, but I'm tough enough to stay with it.

Still, I would not recommend this route.
What is the best way to test mobile app across several networks and phones?
Good point. I try to do the same, which is why I post semi-frequently here, and never post on Reddit. This community tends to reward quality responses, whereas larger communities tend to evolve to the point of rewarding asinine negativity.

That said, most of the negative comments made by those on reddit about articles I have written tend to be fairly accurate...
Paul Graham - Arc

Aaron Swartz - web.py
Paypal originally tried to draw all revenues off the float (IIRC), and it didn't work too well. Of course, it didn't hurt with respect to attracting customers.
Which makes me think that there will be no "last great battle" for the PC. Just sync your iPhone with every piece of data in the universe by plugging it into some to-be-determined shaped hole in your wall.
I understood the comment before me differently: I thought it was criticized that the content providers (people putting videos on YouTube) would expect something in return, not that YouTube & Co would expect a payment of sorts. I know that Social Webpages are not really free.
AdJug Gets Millions for New Ad Marketplace
please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
you make all the content. they keep all the revenue.
500,000 iPhones sold over the weekend
VC tiers? Who is where?
I keep hearing about third tier and top tier VCs. Other than the Ycombinator rankings I have not seen anything else that ranks VCs. How will you put them in their places ;-) ?
Perhaps part of what makes this more of a 'community' is that most negative comments here are something you probably could say in person to the person in question, whereas the reddit comments, while accurate, are things you would (or should, at least) feel ashamed to say to someone's face.
Markus Frind: "Do VC Backed Founders Actually Make Any Money?"
Tutorial on developing a Facebook platform application with Ruby On Rails
I'll throw out a few of my faves: Joel Spolsky, Adrian Holovaty, Avi Bryant, Cal Henderson, Andy Baio. And of course: Paul Graham.
thefunded.com is decent
i have not used this myself, but seems to be a good option (if claims are true):

http://deviceanywhere.com/index.jsp

if you try it, i would be interested in how you find the service.
Got a budget? Check with centercode.com; they have a pool of volunteer testers, and can send out a survey to select users with the target phones on the target networks.

No budget? It's a really tough problem. Test where you can and ask for reports from other users. Offer something of value or interest for detailed bug reports from platforms you can't test yourself. There are only so many J2ME base platforms so you can group by those, but in the end you need to test on each specific device.
In the past I have used a combination of tools:
- Smartphne emulator developer edition (comercial) from yospace (http://www.yospace.com/spede.html)

- Two firefox extenstions: user agent switcher, wmlbrowser.

- You can find some more info. at http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ . Their mailing list is pretty good too.
The Best Things in Life -- Frogs, iPhones, XKCD, and more
Avoiding Walled Gardens on the Internet
What language are you writing your app in? If using J2ME, I would suggest checking out J2ME Polish to organize your builds across multiple platforms. There is a built in device database that lists most phones along with their supported APIs.

While it wont replace eventual real-world testing, it at least allows you to focus in on devices that support the specific APIs, form factors, etc that you need and ignore the ones which you do not.

The J2ME Polish GUI libraries are also excellent and work well across different devices.
two @ ram7.com
Why Conservative Direct Marketers Should Embrace Wildly Creative Ideas
Here's the point of the post:

"As direct marketers, we are not supposed to rely on speculation, opinions, and biases. In our marketing communications discipline, it is all about actual dollar votes.

And because this is marketing communications, it pays to pay attention to the communications end. In fact, it may be the source of your greatest triumphs."
like this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32038
The real hat trick is to combine the two approaches. You can "ask" the users for explicit feedback, but use metadata to decipher their real interest and intention.
In-depth review of iPhone
He has a point, though he's wrong in a lot of details. It's true that one of the best ways to make a lot of money out of a startup is not to raise too much.

What he doesn't seem to get is that some startups actually cost a lot to start. Loopt, for example, could not have been built without VC scale money. If you want to do something like that (or Google), you need millions. And if you succeed, you end up rich. Ending up with 10% of the company is not so bad if the company is worth a billion dollars.

Also, his statistics are junk. That "government report" showing that most small businesses are still in operation after 4 years has nothing to do with startups. The small businesses they're talking about are plumbers and shoe shops. The success rate is lower for startups. Which makes sense, because the payoff, if the company succeeds, is much higher.
"What would you rather own, 100% of something or 5% of a dream?"

This goes directly against what I've heard before: "a small piece of a big pie is better than a large piece of nothing."
I don't know of anything except

http://ycombinator.com/topvcs.html

In fact, that's why we had to make it; we wanted to know
ourselves.
How to track pageviews for individual pages in Facebook apps with Google Analytics
Firefox Add-on for Scribd
I can't wrap my head around the price. I'd seriously rather blow 600 dollars on a bottle of wine. At least it would be a real status symbol.
Most people are lucky to innovate once in a lifetime. Steve-o has done it over and over again.

- original apple

- macintosh

- iPod / iTunes

- os x mac

- Pixar

- iPhone

A big piece of innovation is knowing what people to trust, and he's definitely been a good picker.
Which startup would you work for? Or What are the criteria in selecting between multiple offers?
If funding reduces your share to X of it's current value, then it should increase the value of your company to, at least, 1/x of it's current valuation.

For example, if funding reduces your 100% ownership to 25% (x = 0.25), then you'll have to multiply the value of your company by 4 (1/.25) to end up with the same valuation. If you think funding will push you beyond the 4x, then it's a good deal.
In general I would like to throw PlentyOfFish out as a bad data point. His experience has been atypical, although he doesn't seem to agree.

He was a single founder, and he did everything himself... which is better phrased as 'everything that got done, he did'.

He didn't have any plan or roadmap; he went along and did what he wanted to, and it worked out well.

Much (most?) of his revenue comes from Google AdSense, which has not been as generous to many other who have chosen it as their primary source of revenue (this is largely helped by his site being lower on resources (some pictures and a lot of text), instead of media intensive).
3 invites for Pownce
Good news, everybody! Now you have to make sure your site works on another platform!

But seriously, that really is good news. There are half a million people in the US who are excited enough about good new technology to throw down some serious cash as soon as it comes out.

Plus they all have the first phone with desktop-grade web browsing capability on a great browser. They can be the core of the next great mobile app, which doesn't need any carrier approval. Did I mention what a great demographic this is for advertisers?

This is awesome.
1st 3 emails get them
Applications Open for Winter 2008 YC Funding
Look at it as a business expense. I actually am since my software needs to have some good mobile functionality.
Don't forget NeXT. I loved those things.
Where/How are you hosting your Facebook App?
I will not be applying a third time. Good luck to all those who do though.
This is a hard problem.

If your app isn't successful then there's nothing to worry about.

But what if your app is super successful? How would you ever be able to secure enough servers to meet the demand without burning a very deep hole in your pocket?

What we need is a Y-Combinator like incubator for Facebook Apps - a company which will host your app and help you scale it up for a chunk of equity.
I m still workin on my prototype :(, best of luck to all who are applying this time.
I think EC2 ( http://aws.amazon.com/ec2 ) is a pretty good way to go but I'm interested in what others are thinking.
The % that you get is only a small point of taking on money. It's all the control and day-to-day mechanics that you are really giving up.
I predict a huge increase in the number of applications this time, thanks to all the publicity and YC success stories. Good luck to everyone!
NetSuite to file IPO (Ellison to make $500M)
This is good news for the enterprise side of the web software business. Now there are fewer reasons for wimpy CIOs to avoid using on-demand software suites, if both CRM (Salesforce) and ERP (NetSuite) are online.
Yes, I imagine that's why the application is up early.
Xobni (YC company) mentioned in CNNMoney|Business2.0
How many applications do you think they receive on average?
I'm curious about this thing now. thanks

mlucero_ at hotmail dot com
If your site gets big, ask someone to host it for you (30boxes hosted one of the most popular apps). You can sell it to RockYou or Slide if it gets too popular. IMO, not a real concern, and when you reach this point, then you will think of some solution.

For now, worry about the real issue: "What is a problem that I can relate to and solve for Facebook users?"
Just for the record, the author, Om Malik, has not seen our software yet. He doesn't even know what we have in store for email :)
We got about 430 last time, of which we ultimately funded 20.

(1 of those 20 immediately merged with a startup from a previous round, so only 19 came to Cambridge.)
I may be remembering all this completely wrong, but I seem to recall yc offering a couple of alternatives to the usual application process - that you could apply with no idea, or you could apply with no co-founders and yc would hook you up as an early employee of a yc-funded startup.

Am I right about those offers, and are you still making them?
schmoe@sent.com
Do you plan to keep the number at 20 this time too or its too early to tell?
Pretty harsh words for someone who hasn't even seen your product. Now you just have to blow him away with how effective your cockroach killer really is!
"A naso", I would say that the underlying economics do differ somehow.

They're obviously different for 'end user' applications, even though network externalities touch on those through file formats.

For phone lines, the network effects are obvious: the value is in 1) connections to people you want to contact frequently, and 2) the potential to contact a wide range of people. No money is made from the actual content, though.

With the "social sites", though, they're aggregating massive amounts of user produced content (most of it pretty insignificant on its own), and making money from that.

At least that's my quick look at it.
If the number of applications is higher, we'll probably accept more. It's not certain there will be more applications, though. There are usually fewer for the winter.
More like Bill Gates's Artix.
Someone should make a big collection of these pithy bits of advice that get written up in bullet points, each one with the opposing bullet point that gets brought up by some other purveyor of wisdom.

I'm certain that for a lot of these people, their advice is not exactly scientific, but more along the lines of "I did this and this and this, and it all worked out", which is fine, but in a complex system like that, who knows what caused what, and what is just noise.

One of the things I liked about 'Founders at Work' was that it was such a wide array of people and undertakings, that it did actually give some insight into things that were common to othewise diverse groups.
We'll probably still let people apply with no idea. We just don't mention this on the site yet.

As for second option, it's right in your menu bar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/jobs
Artix reference:

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html
Here's a prereq: having enough cash to live on until you can turn a profit or convince someone to invest. That's my biggest worry right now.
I dont think there's any point in my applying again - am likely on PG's blacklist. :D
You won't have it ready by October 11?
Next is wrapped up in the os x line item.
So Apple just made $0.25-0.3 billion in three days... not too shabby, I would say.
Couple ideas came to mind. I'm sure there are others.

1. Would you be working on a product with a potentially huge market? Or is it simply a "cool" product?

2. How do you like the founders and other people? Ask them: what are the 3 best things they like about the work, and the 3 things they detest the most? What's their history?
I'd like an email client that automatically skins threads into a forum (like this one).

That'd be easy.
Very nice. The time has come for that app :)
thank you. That would be nice but it doesn't test the functionality from one operator to the other.
Nice. but cost too much. Thanks for the link.
The Long Tail of Facebook Applications
Yospace is really cool. thank you
Not too bad centercode. Thank you Merlot.
Marc Andreessen on Ning
Like J2me, wap, sms, IVR etc..? We are looking for a mobile startup co-founder?
Email us at cribornament at gmail dotcom
mattculbreth AT gmail DOT com
and thanks
What comes to mind initially:
The start up has to have a clear intention:
-demonstrates clarity in the unique tasks that need to happen
-demonstrates trust in that others are creatively capable in doing specific tasks independently
-demonstrates the simplest process for arriving to first prototype to be tested by users
any improvements that you guys can think of for this add-on? what else would make your life easier when using Scribd.com?

Tim
thanks for the tip, useful.
"Good news, everybody! Now you have to make sure your site works on another platform!"

The iPhone ships with Safari, doesn't it? So if you're app works on Safari it should work on the iPhone
I don't think it would be smart to include hosting in an incubator. We made a conscious choice not to.

(a) Economically hosting is a commodity. It's not an area where we can add any special value. We don't do hosting for the same reason we don't supply office or living space: it's better for founders just to buy these on the open market.

(b) Hosting is a technical problem, which it's good for founders to have to solve. We're happy to deal with all the paperwork of incorporation, because you really don't have to know about that stuff to run a company. (I haven't read half our legal documents myself.) But startups do have to understand how to manage servers.
Facebook Age Distribution (useful for those of you thinking of making a Facebook App)
EC2 is not suitable for most Web applications:

- You don't get a static IP address, so if your instance fails and needs to reboot, you might end up with a different IP address.

- If your instance fails, it also loses all the data stored in it.

- There is no hardware load balancing.

With that said, you can probably use it to complement your other servers by doing some of the batch processing.
No not really. Netvibes is a bit off as are things that work advanced JavaScript. I'm sure they'll release some updates but it seems that it's got a couple holes here and there.
Has your position changed regarding single founders, or is it still a case of single founders need not apply?
That's covered in the fourth from last paragraph.

Basically, we'll bend any rule if you're a genius, but
anyone, even a genius, is more likely to succeed if they
have a cofounder.