skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess most people would be quick to say, "That's no problem at all", and maybe even add an "of course" statement like Of course, there is nothing wrong with owning a pornography business, even though there are plainly a few things wrong with it.

Funny how the received wisdom of the day changes, and how most morality is so knee-jerk. In the past, any association with pornography would have been deeply shameful. Now, if the MSM published a "story" on how phillip morris owns Nabisco, you can bet there would be a lot of people expressing outrage over that association (cigarettes, unlike porn, being quite evil). Oh well.
I'm curious to hear why you think LinkedIn is broken...

It seems to be working pretty well for a lot of people.
Facebook delivers appalling ad clickthroughs: 0.04% clickthrough
I agree, I don't think most of the comparisons out there are apt, other than the fact the two companies are both at the center of IPO speculation in the valley.

Granted I'm still in college, but my Facebook profile and my LinkedIn profile are like night and day. I do put some of the information from LinkedIn on Facebook (they do have a Work & Education section in profiles), but that's not why people look at my profile.

I certainly wouldn't want the comments on my wall showing up when people are analyzing my profile as a job candidate.

The two services just don't mesh very well on a high level.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine the other day and she simply said "What ads on facebook?". She not a techie, doesn't use an ad blocker and logs into facebook daily. We're all used to these ads and don't even see them anymore, in much the same way we all channel surf or go to make a cup of tea during TV ad breaks.

Perhaps we need a new way of delivering ads in communication apps that differs from information & entertainment apps. Twitter, facebook, blyk and many other face this same problem with monetisation. Whats the solution? Is it ok to analyse what people are saying to each other and deliver text link ads inline with the conversation. If I say "Want to go for a drink later?" to a friend on facebook should there be a link underneath saying "Get half price drinks a Bob's Bar"?

Any ideas?
PG: Do you prefer teams to submit not quite complete forms and then incrementally add info as time goes by, or do you prefer a complete application submitted and then minor updates as time goes by?
There's nothing surprising here. Facebook users are more sophisticated than most internet surfers and generally just ignore the ads.

Here's my proposal for getting people to look at online advertising seriously:

http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/2007/07/how-to-get-people-to-...
The ability to defer the income from stock options, opposed to other forms of income, clearly differentiates it from most income.
Romlet blog widget combines brag badge, analytics tool and bookmarking buttons
Don't Read This Blog! Be More Productive By Ending Your Blog Addiction
What Entrepreneurs Most Want to Know: June 2007's Most Popular Work.com How-to Guides
"pretty much a cofounder"? with about 1% overall or 5% of a real cofounder's stock.

the guys at the new startup I joined work pretty hard, but I'll never work 80 hours a week for 1% or .01% of a company.
Web 2.0: Add A Note To Any Page Or Blog!
I've been questioning the honesty and the intelligence of the people (some second-tier VCs) who are touting and actively promoting F8 as a "great" way for startups to acquire users.

Fact is, Facebook is only making so much money because Microsoft entered into an agreement with them guaranteeing them profits per year. You as an independent developer will get even crappier CTRs.

One 'organically' acquired user on your own site is worth at least 1000 Facebook app users. Don't be fooled by the numbers!
I don't think it will hurt to submit an application even if you don't get an interview. Writing up the application gives you a different understanding of your project, and you are probably going to get some great feedback as a bonus.
...yet. If all the college (and now graduate) students on Facebook start using the service as a recruiting tool, then I can see it being a real threat to LinkedIn.
Summer YC startup launches: Versionate's Wiki End Run Around Google Docs
The title of this and the Techcrunch article are misleading.. Does this service wrap Google Docs via the pubic API? (is there even one?)
No, this does not depend on Google Docs. I believe the article is saying this is likely a competitor to Google Docs.
I changed the title so that it makes more sense and is more flattering than tc probably intended :)
Do folks know about good sources of CTRs for various sites? It seems like much of that information is gated.

If 0.04% is bad, is 0.4% bad? Surely 4% is good. And how are these rates going to change with metrics better than unique page views?
sweet, congrats guys! -- who's on pager duty? ;)
butts glued to chair. no pager :)
I've started to use Google Docs a lot. Trying Versionate, for text there is little advantage of either. GDocs seem a bit more peppy.

I was reading a Paul Graham interview from a while ago:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/09/02/an-interview-with-vc-pa...

Here is an interesting quote:
"
I wouldn't advise competing with Google in things they're good at. So what is Google good at? As a first approximation, making things their own developers use at work. So they'll do a better job on an online calendar than a video sharing site, for example, because their employees are probably not supposed to be sitting watching videos at work.
"

He goes on to mention Google's size, which is probably another factor here.

It would be interesting to hear more about what folks at Y-Combinator think about this direct assault on a growing Google service.
I should justify my comments -- I only spent 2 minutes on versionate and plan to come back to try more.
It's an indirect assault.
If you joined a YC-funded startup that early, you could expect more than 1%.
Introducing iUI (UI library for iPhone)
Setup a Ruby on Rails Development Environment Fast in Vista
This method uses IntantRails (Apache, Mongrel, MySQL), RadRails (Ruby on Rails Development Environment) and the Aptana IDE (based on Eclipse). There are only six easy steps.
There seems to be this new crop of ridiculously overdesigned websites recently. Versionate, Docstoc, iscrybe, etc. I'm not sure how I feel about it.

I was reading Viktor Frankel's holocaust memoir recently. He makes the claim that people find meaning in their lives through meeting people, going places, doing work, and through unavoidable suffering.

I think he's right. And sometimes I think that web designers would do well to add a little unavoidable suffering.

Some of these new websites seem user centric to the point of being obsequious. It's kind of like when a guy is following around a girl and constantly doing nice things for her. You'd think it would be cool, but it gets kind of creepy after a while.

The concept is solid and the technology is brilliant. It just makes me a little uncomfortable for some reason.

/least useful criticism ever :-)
very cool... much much improved since the last time I played with it!
A more technically literate user base will use Adblock.

And it's about time -- it's bizarre that start-ups are trying to get acquired with money that ultimately comes from advertising Tide. Don't offend the corporate sponsors.
There's ads on Facebook?
I blogged about it here: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/assumptiond...

Basically, I think it makes the wrong assumptions about the way people network.
Really clever idea, but it seems a little buggy right now =/
Maximum Success From Home
Help with a JavaScript Drop-Down Menu
Does anyone know if there's a tutorial somewhere on how to build the kind of drop-down menus seen on Facebook and Versionate?
Is Jeopardy! a viable source of startup funding?
Well, I'm on tonight's show, so I guess we'll see (I'm co-founder of LALife.com, a local real estate site). Tune in and find out.
Good Luck!
Just make sure not to spell the host's name backward ;)
Crippled bluetooth and low ringtones volume. How familiar... Every time I try to buy a smartphone I end up hitting these two walls.
Someone totally beat me to it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnX-fqlo1M

A guy also bet $1337 in the college tournament.
Stupid Rumor: Microsoft Buying Facebook for $6 Billion
After watching the screencast I got some good insight into what Versionate can do [the features], but I still don't know how it will improve my life [the benefits].

I think you should really stress the benefits and tell people why it is so important to have their files online.

Peace of Mind. You never have to worry about losing important files when your computer crashes.

Instant access to your files from anywhere. If you forget your computer or flash drive at home [no need to worry] your files are online and you can get them when you arrive at work.

I think some simple comments like this could really help.
8 Ways to Help Boost Your Inspiration
Thought I would list out the methods that I find helpful when I am in an inspirational rut. Enjoy.
I used JotSpot before and nobody in my previous office like the editor because it's very clunky. The auto-save and all that were really an annoyance than a lifesaver.

When I read (via their blog) that Versionate is doing similar thing.. I don't know if I should give it a try...
Product Development: The Learning Game
Suffering may (or may not) be good for people, but that doesn't mean it's the job of designers to supply it. Especially not the designers of something like Versionate. Versionate is a tool, and tools should be self-effacing.

Plus, most people are already way over their lifetime allowance for software-induced suffering.
Scheme/Lisp, one of Montreal's tech expertise
What Nielsen's Metric Shift Means - And What It Doesn't Mean
"If you have an unhappy customer on the Internet, he doesn't tell his six friends, he tells his 6,000 friends"

I like the data export (even with the free version). It's a nice touch. why? it's my observation that users don't care about the software they use as much as they do about their data. so reading this makes me think they are in the right mindset ~ http://blog.versionate.com/2007/04/07/export-your-data-at-an...
> 1. Take care of your employees.

That is certainly a given. Luckily, lots of hackers I know just want to be given hard problems. The cave offices with aerons and dual 30-inch screens are just good tools :)
Lots of the tasks done by employees at Costco and other such stores will become automated. Say, within 10 to 20 years -- which is actually light speed. But no need to elaborate on that SciFi.

> 2. Keep prices low.

For the web, this seems to translate to: "make it free". That makes lots of sense, I think. Too bad ads are too often the business model for content creators.

> 3. Pay attention to the customer, not the competition.

Too true. And for the latter, it shouldn't change your behavior, right? Young companies with lots of competition need to work as hard as possible to make what people want. Young companies with no competition should work as hard as possible to make what people want and fill the void.

> 4. Focus on a few core options.

Feature creep in software can make users cry. I recall that interesting survey the other day, where given a grab-bag of capabilities, a survey group were allowed to configure a cell phone in any way they wanted. Then, given cell phones that matched their wish list- they complained that it had more than they needed.

But on second thought that could have easily been caused. poor design.

> 5. Use surprise to create excitement.

This is just a way for Costco to make customers happy, which is the main point, right?

It would be interesting though if a web company tried this. For example, it would be cheap for Reddit to give a $100 lottery for that days highest karma gains. That rubs me as dangerous though.

On a side note, Costco is doing a bit of emotional leverage here. People hate WalMart. It is very much in Costco's best interest to start saying, "wow, people love us". Not that there is anything wrong with that...
its faster to give it a try than read its blog
> the class is taught to the lowest common denominator

Not the highest common factor?
So FB makes:

15.8x10^9(pageviews/month)x0.01x0.04/100 + 0.25x15.8x10^6 = $4x10^6 per month on ads?

So their annual revenue is just under $50x10^6 or $50 million.

Note: this assumes one ad per page.
Very impressive. When did you guy start to work on this?

Suggestion -- Quicktime plugin is not universally installed, and you target audience is not just Apple users (see your Google Analytics report). Use Flash.
Matchmine.com
Advertising in general is hard to do well. Just throwing up standard "click on our site" banner ads won't have good click through rates wherever you put them up. We had good success with our fb flyers by keeping them topical and interesting - it was written about here: http://www.trendcatching.com/2006/12/ycombinator_sta.html
I don't think thats the case everywhere though.
Look at what Pandora has done. I think each of their ads looks phenomenal. I sometimes keep staring (and end up clicking!) at the ads just because they are so beautifully integrated with the site.
meeting people, going places, doing work, and through unavoidable suffering

Rather odd summary of the holocaust experience. I'm really not sure if it's a good model for web design though.
Totally unrelated to the author of this post. My apologies! now going back to what gyro said. You mean to tell me Flickr, YouTube and Myspace have junky backends?? Makes me feel a little bit better about the app I'm working. How'd you know about this?
I live in Tokyo and don't think it's very different from the US. The ATMs have amazing transfer features, like looking up a friend's account to send him money. I pay for a lot of things, like rent, through cashless transfers at an ATM. I pay cash at the convenience store for my utilities, which I paid by check in the US.

It's well known that many older Japanese people keep huge sums of cash savings in their houses. There are occasionally almost comical stories in the newspaper about houses getting broken into and the thieves walking out with obscene amounts of money.

I'm a huge fan of cash in general. I do value seeing my money and hate the idea of all my transactions being logged. I totally agree with the premise of the article, I've been doing this for years.
Marketing Facebook Apps
Social Networks Just a Feature? (think of social networking as part of a 'larger experience')
Up with Downfly
Redeye VC: The .VC Domain
Wow, that's really awesome. Although I think Costco can do a few things to bring their image up to speed (the logo is pretty hideous, the marketing materials are pretty ugly and cliche), this article really makes me respect the company and the CEO.

Why can't all companies work like this?
+1 to above...

also, you can start a startup whenever, and have the rest of your life to live the 'startup life' (i.e. worksleepworksleepworksleep until/while good things happen :)), but only 4 years of college.

i would argue that tagging coeds and having a social life also helps you later as a founder to get along with the non-engineers, who often bond over drinking and talking about tagging coeds :) (not to mention the recent spate of articles about parallels between dating and startups..)

and taking time off is good (i took a year off but still lived with my college friends) but the longer you take off, the more coming back sucks, because all your friends have graduated.
This may be a silly question, but it's something that's bothered me ever since Scribd launched: How do you handle all the file format conversions?

It seems to be that you couldn't be wrangling all those formats yourself, as many are undocumented, and/or hideously complex, and you've got to do a lot more work than simply reading the files, and not much time to do it. So, are there some off-the-shelf components to do this work (with reasonable license terms), or is the problem easier than it seems?

I'm most interested in the MSFT formats, which seem the trickiest.
Words on running a small web business from an Italian entrepreneur
Michele Finotto, creator of 16bugs.com, talks about how is to be a web entrepreneur when you are not in the Valley (not that much different it seems)
"None of us have taken time off in the last three years..."

...

"Just don't forget that you really aren't going to get paid in cash this week. Or next week. Or next month."

I don't know when you throw in the towel on your own baby, but it certainly seem questionable to join a startup that's been in crunch mode for 3yrs and still can't make payroll.
Andrew Chen: What's your viral loop? Understanding the engine of adoption
Great Logo!!!

The beginning of the screencast made me think, about the "folders as you would expect on your desktop": actually a lot of people don't really understand folders and files. They just press "save" in word, which then uses the first few words of the document as filename. If the document disappers from "recent documents" in words, these users have trouble recovering their documents... Just a thought - it definitely seems to be more targeted at cooperations, on the other hand, maybe a lot of users would benefit from an iTunes/GMail way of organising the documents (ie just keep them in a flat list and tag them)?

Versioning documents is another thing that people have lots of trouble with, so versionate definitely offers something new and worthwhile in that respect.
I just figure that if the people running it weren't sharing an office with a porn service, they'd probably still go home and watch lots of pornography at home. I am almost inclined to have more trust in somebody running a porn business than someone who is not, with respect to child molesting - I think the people suppressing their desires might be more dangerous in the end.
My first guess would be Abiword. In the course of putting together an open source word processor that can handle a couple of different closed file formats, they've spun off their code into libraries. The wvWare library handles Word files. http://abiword.com/projects/

As far as I know, the whole Abiword project is GPL, though that shouldn't matter much for server-side code, unless you're letting your customers host the service themselves, like Versionate seems to be planning on doing... I guess you could just pipe the output from a thin wrapper around the library to the rest of your code.
7 Lessons from the Zantaz Firesale (Sold for $375m, Founders Got Nothing)
short version: company sells for $375M, founders got zilch. Check the details in the link.
indeed. you have absolutely no argument whatsoever. please take the psuedo-intellectual crap back to reddit.

please cease (ooh, rhyme) the horrible analogies and abstractions as well.

p.s. how on earth does a document management app make you feel uncomfortable? please step outside of your sheltered world and take a stroll
Facebook VCs: We're Investing in Facebook Apps Too
They're promoting and "investing" into Facebook apps because they're major investors in Facebook and will benefit from Facebook IPO. More apps, bigger the IPO?!

In any case, it has nothing to do with them wanting YOU to succeed.
"Fact is, Facebook is only making so much money because Microsoft entered into an agreement with them guaranteeing them profits per year. You as an independent developer will get even crappier CTRs."

One huge reason why I suspect Facebook's click through rates are so low is because they actually respect their users by not putting their ads in annoying, profitable places. As an Facebook app developer, you probably have far fewer users than Facebook, so you don't have the luxury of making up the costs of respect with volume. If you put your ads in more annoying places than Facebook does without being annoying enough for people to stop using your app, you can probably make money. The Graffiti app does this on their canvas pages with AdSense. I'd like to see their numbers.

Or you could actually do a good job of advertising instead of silly lowest common denominator ads. As a Facebook Platform app, you have access to quite a bit of data about your users. Use it. To do a good job of it, you'd probably have to sell your own ads. Then you could ask yourself if each ad will actually be useful to your users, and reject them if they're not. Whether or not that would be a profitable endeavor is left as an exercise for the reader.

The other option is to provide a useful service to your users that results in them paying you money. Very 20th century, I know. iLike seems to be doing a pretty good job of it.
They're promoting and "investing" into Facebook apps because they're major investors in Facebook and will benefit from Facebook IPO. More apps, bigger the IPO!

In any case, it has nothing to do with them wanting YOU to succeed.
You seem to have noticed that discussions are far better on news.yc than they are on reddit, but you clearly haven't figured out why. Most people who decide to comment make sure their comments actually add to the discussion, which the grandparent poster did, even if you disagree with him. You, however, didn't.

Don't leave, just post smarter.
In a linked article, it was reported that one of the founders got 650k, which is still nothing compared to the 375M. It really makes you look at the reputations of the VCs.

"The reportedly terminally ill founder, William Bankert, will end up with only $650,000 or so from the sale."
http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-th...
375 million isn't a firesale; especially when you're dealing with "email archiving" which sure sounds like a wrapper around the "cp" command.
Well, it's better to get none of something big than a big part of nothing, right? Wait a second...
onclick="Element.toggle('menu_id')"
Great Logo!!!

Ubuntu inverse with an additional family member.
Lesson 3 - Keyword research for best positioning 
In lesson 3, you've learned practically everything there is to know about keywords and can now apply this fundamental SEO principle to your site.
True, didn't notice that. Actually now is the first time I took a closer look at the ubuntu logo and recognized it as abstract people.
HOW TO: Using the Digg API with Ruby on Rails
In 10 minutes you can learn how to create your own Digg API application using Ruby on Rails.
> Why can't all companies work like this?

Because most people believe that in order for them to win someone else must lose.
i for one am completely anal about version control. i work in engineering offices and version control of, for instance detailed design drawings, is extremely important - most things worth building with actual steel have quite a few zeros after them and you NEVER want to have a conversation half way through the build that starts with "i'm using v3.4.3.5 which one are you using?". most CAD software for instance has version control as the entry point, not at the end.
when i did a stint in an office environment i was appalled at their version control (it's on the CFO's hard drive and he just re-saves it as a new version - not neccesarily date driven...) and was in a meeting with their multi-million budget review when two VP's discovered they were reporting actuals vs budget from two different versions (not sure if one or both were wrong...).
what problem/value does versionate give to customers? IMHO an unbelievable amount - centralised storage (even on your own server), a weblink that only has the currently released best version, the ability to import/export - these are all Very Good Things. I really hope you guys do well. Oh and btw, i love the pricing scheme.
...next week i delve into water is wet.
O'Reilly Radar: Google's Authentic Voice Problem
I checked who their VCs were, made quite a discovery.

http://www.generalatlantic.com/usa/news/newsarticle.asp?id=1...

Name familiar to anyone? General Atlantic were Ars Digita's VCs:

http://www.waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
I would think that the average user in the target market for this app knows a little something about filesystems.