skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"On another note, why is your software better than cPanel?"

That's actually the same note. If you had the question when looking at the website, others will too. ;-)

I'm working on a new comparison chart (the old one was too wordy) to post to the website sometime soon.

Short answer:

We're mobile capable. Nearly everything in the browser UI degrades to a usable mobile accessible version

We're clean and polite to the underlying system. Sysadmins who've dealt with cPanel or Plesk on the command line will know how valuable this distinction is.

Comprehensive and easily scriptable command line and remote API.

Ruby on Rails and Gems support in the next release this weekend

PHP 4 and PHP 5 simultaneously with php.ini and PEAR modules management

mod_fcgid with suexec (rather than the old and rather clunky suphp)

spam/AV filtering per-user and per-domain

built-in WYSIWYG website builder

nice database GUIs for MySQL and PostgreSQL (I believe they are nicer than phpMyAdmin and phpPgAdmin, but if the user disagrees we also provide those)

70+ easily installable applications (compare to Fantastico at $199 extra), including SugarCRM and a few others that nobody else has the guts to touch because they're so damned complicated to install

comprehensive monitoring and alerts (also mobile capable)

optional Google Analytics (and Quantcast and MyBlogLog) injection into all pages, regardless of how they're served--static, PHP, Ruby, CGI, whatever

tiered pricing, so someone with a couple of domains doesn't have to spend $450

There's more, but I'm talking too much again...
Haha yeah, it's from this month's magazine.
True, but Kevin Rose hasn't given it his 100% disinterested, totally nonbiased, wildly positive appraisal yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4
Valid point. Whenever folks come to us through "web 2.0" focused channels there is the built-in assumption that it's a service. But, we want to help folks build services on their own servers. I'll spend a bit more effort on making the distinction clear, and making "download it now!" an obvious component (I'm in the midst of porting our automated installer from the commercial version to the Open Source version, so that'll make it easier...right now the GPL version is rather complicated to get spinning).
James Hong: Reinventing HOTorNOT, Part I
Geezus, the guy is entitled to an opinion about a technology that he has used to deploy a website. You must really care because you bothered to post some dickish response.
I don't think its so much a Rails issue as a Ruby issue. Of late a new breed of Rubyists has emerged, and they are surprisingly militant. Here's hoping its just a phase. More options are indeed good, ands its weird to see the users of a language heavily based off of perl decide that there is indeed only one solution to a problem. ;)
They have the best approach to interviews out of all the YC style companies.

There is a one-week intensive learning experience, a week long Startup Camp. At the end, they pick 5 teams to invest E50,000 for a 10% stake. One week will give them enough time to really get a sense for the team members. The rejected applicants still get the benefits of the one week program.

edit: Seems to add extra characters in front when I use the  character
Meet digg.com and Reddit, heirs of Slashdot
Maybe PG needs to set big blue straight on the whole Slashdot ---> Digg and Delicious ---> Reddit thing. :)
EuroFroth - State of startups in Europe
This is quite telling:

"I think Silicon Valley will never happen in Europe. People here care too much about their family and friends. People give up their family and friends to move to Silicon Valley, and it would mean people here would have to move to Paris or Stockholm or London. Instead of one Silicon Valley, Europe will have pockets of excellence in different cities."
How To Manage Your Retail Business
CampusU has filed to go public on the Nasdaq where it plans to raise $28.8M.

Doesn't this further argue that going public is beside the point? The point is making money, and when you're that small, the whims of investors can wipe you right out. Another reason Google doesn't split its stock.
Searching for Type-Error Messages (works by finding similar programs that do type-check)
Wow.. this site must have required many long nights and lots of coffee to put together.
Not quite ready to go all the way? Be a catalyst.
What have you done so far? As a climber/boulder-er myself, I think climbers can be qualified as an affinity group. In other words if you can get a few climbers using the site (and they like it) they should pass the info about your site to other climbers. Or think of how most climbers use the internet - what sites do they use - that's another source of marketing ideas (think cross promotions). Have you tried to post information about your site on relevant blog/forum sites?
Next NASA mission: Twitter and Facebook
While Ruby and Rails are slow, the issue is overblown. There is at most an order of magnitude difference between RoR and reasonable alternatives (php, python, etc.), and realistacally the difference is closer to a factor of 3. This might sound important, but there is bigger fish to fry when talking about performance. All of the above are dead slow, 3-4 orders of magnitude slower than optimal C implementation.

In a typical web app, HTTP optimization and doing O(1) queries rather O(n^2) per page is where performance lies. You can develop web apps quickly these days, and the code can be clean, but you end up going from Palo Alto to Menlo Park through Paris. Sure, a supersonic plane can do that route quicker than a handicapped turtle, but the trick is not going through Paris altogether. RoR makes rewring the code to avoid the Paris trip easy, fast and resulting code remains reasonably readable. And that's the holy grail.

Having said that, that 3x performance boost to RoR would sure be nice, and would put more areas of our application into "Roundtrip through Paris OK" category.
Twittergrams, Day 5 (Innovation cont, Dave Winer style)
Tinyurl has an API ( http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=http://news.ycombinator.com )
TripIt Looking for Beta Testers (email us your travel confirmation emails and we do the rest)
which means... it wasnt competing well enough with http://www.morecute.com - i think this will be deleted- by pg lol
YCNewsers: Help me create better online bookmarking
Most people I talk to (outside of the Web2.0 crowd) have never even heard of social bookmarking, so I think there is a great opportunity here waiting to be discovered. I want to hear from you guys what you like and dislike about what's available today. Especially from those of you who don't use an online bookmarking web site. Why don't you?
If Google's going to pay me X million dollars or even X million GOOGs, I'd be more than happy working there until the integration is complete.
Dispatches From the Hyperlocal Future (Bruce Sterling: databases of the new Web stuffed with geo coordinates)
I use del.icio.us, it's good for what I need. Would be nice if I can set it so that all my bookmarks are private so I don't have to check that litle checkbox everytime. I don't use public bookmarks.
iPhone vs wireless industry (wireless: "What do customers want? We have no idea")
does anyone have an invite code so I can try this out?
Europe's heavily regulated labour market means that it's significantly more expensive and risky to hire people in your startup. A "work 18 hours a day" Microsoft/Apple would be almost impossible in those countries.

It's not easy to start companies in France and Germany, compared to the US, UK, Ireland and other English speaking countries: http://www.heritage.org/index/countries.cfm

Compare France:

The labor market operates under regulated employment rules that could be improved to enhance employment and productivity growth. The non-salary cost of employing a worker is very high, and dismissing a redundant employee can be costly. There are rigid restrictions on increasing or expanding the number of working hours. Due partly to complicated and pervasive labor regulations, the unemployment rate is high. A recent effort to reform the regulated labor market met fierce resistance.

.. and Germany:

The labor market operates under restrictive employment regulations that seriously hinder employment and productivity growth. The non-salary cost of employing a worker is high, and dismissing a redundant employee is costly. Reforms implemented in recent years focus on reducing welfare benefits for the unemployed. However, Germany's wages and fringe benefits remain among the world's highest, and the ability of businesses to fire workers is subject to rigid conditions, all of which serves as a disincentive to invest and create jobs.

to the US:

The labor market operates under highly flexible employment regulations that enhance overall productivity growth. The non-salary cost of employing a worker is low, and dismissing a redundant employee is costless.
Slashdot---Digg---Reddit---Slashdot

is the more likely scenario. The quality of Digg is so low only 17 year old gamers enjoy the site now. Reddit is following.

Honestly, I don't see these sort of user driven news aggregation sites have legs. How do they not end up going the way of Kro5hin after 2-3 years?
I'm in HI. I'm not going to HVCA lunch, though.

Did you try Act221 benefits? A few years back it seemed that everybody in this business trying to get that. At that time my business was pretty small and I didn't bother.
"... And there's no documentation to the point of seeming intentional ..."

Python documentation is on my continuous reading list & is one of the pluses for python usage. But lack of it hasn't stopped Rails adoption. Why? Is it that Rails is that simple to use (for experienced developers)?
Guy Kawasaki: My iPhone Review
SmugBlog: No iPhones for corporate accounts?!
How much time do developers typically spend designing their application?
I'm a catalyst. And ready.
I use the new one in the Google Toolbar as it's a single button press (star) to add it. No dialogs or anything. I can't be bothered with tagging or confirmation dialogs. I just want to press a single button and have the browser remember it.

http://www.google.com/support/firefox/bin/static.py?page=features.html&v=3
inspiring piece.
"... I don't see these sort of user driven news aggregation sites have legs ..."

In what way? Slashdot is 10 years old so you can create a business from '(tech) news aggregation'.

"... How do they not end up going the way of Kro5hin after 2-3 years? ..."

My stab at it is the further you go mainstream, the more general the majority of topics & information. Could the solution to this be trying to stay to the low-amplitude end of the long tail ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail ) of possible submissions (finding, encouraging posts from obscure original articles, posts) and trying to avoid the popular aggregated posts or high-amplitude (mainstream media searches for stories, add a bit of commentary + add) you see in the mainstream?

The real value for readers (in my opinion) is in the access to variety of information. Low amplitude is equals greater diversity of information.
Word Problem
A recent college graduate named David decides to pursue entrepreneurship instead of employment, so he moves to the Silicon Valley. He has a big idea for a web application, $50,000, and the application designed in adobe illustrator. He does not have a technical background or a co-founder[s]. WHAT SHOULD HE DO?
No, I haven't; I just moved back a week ago. I'm interested in creating a startup, but if I can't get some angel money to live on in the next several weeks, I'll need to get a day job.

Do you know of any non-obvious downsides to Act 221?

Also, can a business owner receive 221 benefits for investing in their own company? That seems ripe for abuse: you could invest $x in your company, raise your salary by $x for one year, and receive the tax credit from the state.
If he has $50,000 it shouldn't be to hard to find developers/co-founders. I really wanted to type - call me :)
"... He does not have a technical background or a co-founder[s] ..."

Find a co-founder & work on a personal problem to solve (because you have no ideas) #6 & #7~ http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

Find a technical co-founder that can program, work on a problem that you have (hint: maybe it could be I can't find a co-founder) #1, #6 & #7 ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html There is a problem with non-technical founders having the right location, some seed money & an idea. The idea will probably change so being obstinate is a mistake #5, #6 ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html The key thing is a technical co-founder(s), pronto & see if their skillset complements yours (btw you didn't mention what area you graduated?). Think Woz & Jobs for example.

You need to find your Woz!, your idea and move from there.

"... and the application designed in adobe illustrator ..."

But this is a sketch right? There are lots of problems thinking this will be your end product. It will change. The most important one being, "is it what people want (& willing to pay for)?". Obstinacy is a mistake #5 ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
It might not be that hard to find any old developer, but if he is getting ready to invest his life savings and is living out of his car because he wants it so bad  he is not going to want any old developer  he wants the right developer. You got to get the right people on the bus before you start driving. So how should he go about finding the right developer/co-founder?
In my opinion it is going to be very hard for a non-developer (non-geek) to judge ~ whether or not a developer knows his or her stuff. Does he know any developers?
"In a typical web app, HTTP optimization and doing O(1) queries rather O(n^2) per page is where performance lies"

Yes, I have found 99% of my speed increases from good database indexing and using hashtables to store data you need more than once.
User driven in the sense the users are the editors. Slashdot is still interesting because the slashdot editors have maintained strict editorial control over the front page.

I agree the user-as-editors can work for niche subjects. The programming subreddit is an example.
I don't know any developers and I agree with your opinion! I thought about explaining my situation to Stanford CS professors and asking for recommendations. I still might do this, but I wanted to get the opinions of the YC community first.
Yes, which is how the American car market has worked for the past seventy years, and also the reason why we'll hit the peak oil point in the next -5 to 30 years. But you're right, learning from mistakes is so passe.
I guess if it was me and I was in that situation I'd start at the book store reading a little about what other startup companies used as far as technology. I'd read as many posts as I could on this site so I could gain insight into what is happening in the web 2.0 world from both a technology side and a business side. Then I could meet a developer and make a more informed judgment about what I was looking for in a co-founder.
The pruning method of choice seems to be evaluating developers based on their contributions to open source projects. You have to be at fairly proficient to successfully submit code to a well run open source project, because bad patches usually won't be accepted (fairly... well... bad... usually... not a very strong sentence is it :p).

AFAIK, the YC route is similar but a bit broader: ask them for any kind of interesting projects they have built. You would need to have someone technical take a look at them (or you could probably post something here and you'd get half a dozen people's opinions on the quality of the work).

Depending on how difficult the idea is to implement (and I realize that this is hard for you to gauge), you may be able to go the Guy Kawasaki route of outsourcing the development. The general rule of thumb the community seems to have agreed upon is that as long as your chief product isn't technology (i.e. technology is not your core focus), then outsourcing at least the initial build is not untenable.

Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to discuss anything in private, I give you my solemn vow not to leak your project... anyway, I have too many other things to work on already :)
I am very confident in both the idea and the design, but I am not stuck on either. The idea has already completely changed once, and has slightly changed several more times.

I know a lot of people claim to have big ideas and it is tough to believe them because talk is cheap, but this is real! Something is going to happen and if anyone is serious about doing a startup I would love to get together to talk. Even if we dont end up working together [passionate young people discussing Ideas, the future, and making life better] couldnt hurt.
I was going to do Tonik ended up being advised by a professional not to. The important thing with all these cheap plans (I have one now around a $100/month) is to make sure they don't just cover generic. If you get really sick and need special drugs--which don't have generics--you're out of luck.

If you live in CA, I'd recommend talking to someone at allhealthplans.com. It's free (the insurer pays them), and they have great information about all the competing companies--no bs, excellent help. I've sent lots of people their way.
I don't use social bookmarking, it has never appealed to me. Browser based bookmarking has always been sufficient for me, and I don't spend much time "browsing" the internet, I am typically trying to find something specific, so a general search engine is usually sufficient for me.

Some features that might make me more likely to use social bookmarking: OpenID accounts, really simple and good search, RSS for tags (no doubt this already exists), syncing with my bookmarks on all the browsers I use and aggregating them in one spot, letting me save my bookmarks to a bookmark file readable by Firefox... thats all of the top of my head, although fundamentally I don't think they fit in my life flow :/
The question I was thinking was: Who exactly is this product for?
Google Gadget Ventures: $5k grant with up to $100k seed funding
Browser autocompletion is fine for me. 99% of my web visits are the same 7 sites (Reddit, News.YC, LiveJournal, GMail, PlanWorld, Yahoo Finance, and diffle.com), so there's a good chance whatever I'm looking for will popup with one keystroke.

If I do need to look something up, I usually just Google for it. I'll usually remember at least one phrase from the article, so I'll stick it in quotes and it pops right up.

I'm not one of those people who absolutely must be able to return to anything I've found. I figure that websites - like nearly everything else - are ephemeral, so if I can't remember one, it must not have been very important to begin with.
Thanks. So, I understand the convenience of the one click, but how do you organize your bookmarks? Isn't it hard to find things when you it's a long list? Especially if you have many bookmarks?
Your right I dont know for sure, but I think the idea will require lots of code and be difficult to implement. I also feel the idea has some viral qualities and may need to scale rather quickly. I would be willing to take on more than one cofounder as long as we were all on the same page, and vested. I dont think outsourcing would work, because I already have some more ideas to implement down the road, plus I want somebody to share the struggle and joy with.

Thanks for your advice and the option to contact you for more. I will probably email you soon. Let me digest my thoughts. I still want to find out about provisional patents and what I should do to protect my IP as I look for a co-founder.
David seems to have put the cart in front of the horse and needs to very quickly find some top-notch programming talent. David should email me, and I can put him in touch with some excellent developers in the SF bay area. The guys I will recommend to you are Real Programmers (Hackers) [1] [2] each of whom has a wide background, from systems software to web apps. (As opposed to people who have not written much real software and who have only picked up the art from a "Teach Yourself Web Development in 24 Picoseconds!" book. [3])

You can also try attending local events and trying to meet people, e.g. at Lunch 2.0s and Super Happy Dev House (shdh.org). The problem with this approach is that since you do not have a technical background, you'll have a hard time distinguishing competent people from people who are able to just talk well and promote themselves. You want to work with someone who can communicate well, but you don't want to get stuck with someone who can only communicate well but can't code worth crap.

N.B. If your idea sucks, you're not going to get good people to work with you.

Also... why is there no contact info in your profile? If someone here wanted to get in touch with you to work with you, they'd look in your profile for an email address.

1. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hacker.html

2. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is

3. http://norvig.com/21-days.html
The excuses for not sharing revenue seem disingenuous. Nothing was stopping them from just writing fat profit sharing checks every month. Perhaps that's not an ideal way of creating a sense of ownership, but it certainly aligns interests well. The guys developing the site would lose money if they messed anything up and make more if they did well. Much of the financial world operates on this type of model.

As for the change in direction, why not just start a new site and promote the heck out of it on HOTorNOT? Something like what Evan Williams did with Odeo/Twitter. That seems like the truly risky and adventurous path.
Kudos to your cyber-cofounder :)
Supernova 2007 - 12 young startups
I saw this earlier today, but I didn't really like the article. Its not an iPhone review, its an AT&T Review.
This is really cool. Google is going into Venture funding in their own unique way...
Max Levchin is an interesting person, I've had an opportunity to speak with him before.

He seems to be pretty engaged in the Facebook stuff right now.
iPhone Web Development Frenzy
Need UI developer for creating next amazing thing based on Web 2.0
Need UI hacker for creating next amazing thing based on Web 2.0 technologies. We are currently team of two people moonlighting for last few months. The product is currently in advanced prototype stage and in need of UI guru for taking the user experience to next level.

You should be able to work for equity in the company.

We are looking for an expert in Adobe Air, Flex, Ajax, HTML, XUL and other web technologies.

Please contact us at:
info at starbucksproject dot com.
Look at the story of Kevin Rose/Digg for some inspiration. He's pretty technical, but not a programmer and didn't do the coding on Digg.

Utilize open source projects (freshmeat.net). Stuff like the CMS Joomla and forum software like phpBB. You don't need a day job, so that's 18+ hours/day to teach yourself technical stuff.

If that $50k is tax free you have at least 1.5 years living expenses and enough cash to pay contractors on elance/craigslist to fill in the gaps.
I use my bookmarks as a "read later" list. So I remove them once I have read them.

By the way Google does let you also tag (label) the bookmark. It's just that you have to press a different button to do that. Supporting both methods like Google does would work pretty well.
Marc has replaced Paul and Joel as my favourite blogger. I still love P&J, but Marc's quality and almost daily output is tremendous.

To be fair Marc probably has years of ideas already built up, whereas P&J need to think of new material for each essay.
Thought: On Convincing
"Convincing people one by one for an outcome is surely a trouble than by convincing them altogether once with an outcome."
Finally a company that wants to encourage people to build products on their platform. Why didn't MS or Apple do this 15 years ago?