skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take confidence that established organizations move slowly. I used to think that lots of bodies and very talented people are faster. They're slower.

Except for things like aircraft carriers. Large organizations can do that better (i.e. at all). So just don't include a nuclear reactor in your plans, and you'll be ok.
I think sometimes a rewrite is worthwhile, but basically Joel's advice is good. Don't just do a rewrite with this vague idea that you'll be able to do it right this time.
Living with Technology: Eye on design: Web 2.0 design
Apple iPhone v1.0.1 Update Now Available (Before Blackhat!)
One source speculated that Apple wanted to get fixes in users' hands ahead of the Black Hat conference where details of early iPhone vulnerabilities could be revealed.
Best start-ups draw strength from IPOs
"The article mistakes more ideas for better ideas."

Most often, the immediate goal of brainstorming is to come up with as many ideas as possible. Leaders of brainstorming sessions often start by encouraging wild ideas and discouraging the "pruning" that you speak of. In that sense, the number of ideas generated is a logical measuring stick.

The goal is usually to hit an outlier, not come out with the best solution on average. If that is the case, it's better to have more ideas, even if the median idea is worse than the median idea generated by a group.
We know Naval, and it's not really a YC clone. Structurally it's more like Idealab or Obvious Inc, in that they develop ideas in house and then spin them off if they succeed.
I think that there is a very strong emotional bond involved when programmers create a product that they think is the best. This is because they have both the craft and the vision - these are critical components for success.

Rokhyakebe in your suggested model marketers will have the vision and not the craft and programmers will have the craft and not the vision.
Filipino startup working on remote iPhone music application
A Filipino software startup who quietly launched an online backup and recovery service for iTunes last month is also working on a homegrown web service that will provide Apple's iPhone users remote access to their iTunes library.
You should invite Randall Munroe to the demo day :)
Ning (and some Andreessen background)
And then there's the issue of market competition from other social-networking players. Translation: What about Facebook?
in 2000 i was moving around a bunch. everything i owned had to fit in the back of my station wagon. that included bed, furniture, musical instruments, computers, books, etc.

i slept on an inflatable mattress for several years. i also lived in a walk-in closet for 6 months. all those things were actually really good. it was an exciting time. living in a closet added to the subversion factor. i was invisible.

with marriage came the consolidation of things, and wedding presents, and now i'm one of the people with a garage full of stuff. strange things. not useful things. bags full of old hammers. children's things that we're saving. the good silverware. a desk that's too big to go in the house.

we live in a large-ish 3 bedroom house and i only spend time in a closet/office, the bathroom, the bedroom, the deck, and the kitchen. i have no use for 800-1000 square feet of my home. but the kids like it.

it's still a very exciting time, but there's lots of stuff. marriage is compromise, and stuff can be a part of that compromise. we have 2 gravy boats. one for everyday gravy and one for special gravy. of course, we only have gravy once every few years. but that's ok. i still work in a closet. somewhat invisible.
I would like to know ,why you chose flex over flash IDE for development. Time constrains?
Oldie but Goodie: The Physics of Passion
It does seem like a problem: sharing the upside and the downside makes people less determined and focused to succeed.

However who knows? The scale of the Internet business is such that things like open source are thriving; this idea might as well have good chances to live and grow.

Finally, people are different and have different needs, this may very well work for some folks.
BUG is an open, consumer oriented, extensible hardware platform....
If the BUG comes to fruition, it is currently in stealth mode start-up mode, then you may well be able to develop all of those consumer devices you've been thinking of all these years but didn't have the money to develop.
Securing Cell Phones
Building onto Facebook's Platform
3 Questions You Must Ask Yourself Before You Buy
You simply print the Wallet Buddy, cut it out and tape it together. Your credit card will fit right into it. This is definitely going into my TrackSuit Tools. If you use the Wallet Buddy properly it causes you to ask yourself questions that every one of us consumers should be asking before we buy new things and bring them into our home.
If you have some kind of attachment to something, then you shouldn't throw it away. It has real value to you. The kind of stuff you should toss is the stuff that you're keeping because you think it's valuable in the abstract.
Yea, like they said, it isn't really for Client-Server stuff. It is a super fast file format though! If you do Mac/Cocoa development you can use SQLite for free with Core Data. By free I mean you don't have to write any custom code for serialization. :-D
Info Product Brainstorm
Nice so what are the better alternatives for Client Server stuff?
Drm237 are you by any chance filipino? Your submissions seem to be filipino centric.
Does racism exist even in news.yc? Pathetic.
I think in adobe flex its easy to work, i don't know why they chose Adobe Flex. But my personal view about Flash Vs Flex. For developers its really easy to work in Flex as compared to Flash.
I lost all my points (karma).
When I woke up this morning my 19 points had turned to zero points. I suspect that someone was down-modding me. Firstly, I didn't even know there was a way to down-mod people, secondly, is there any way to get these points back and/or stop that person from down-modding me in the future.
It's not even racism, I'm just asking if he's filipino that's all. If it does help I'm half filipino as well. I'm just interested in the startup development in the Phils.
When you put "pick any ethnic group [filipino, jewish, black, mexicans, etc.]" in the same sentence as "nobody seems to care", people will get the wrong impression.
"I doubt there's much the telcos can do to Google"

Read Andy Kessler's writings on the telcom business. These people wield some serious political power -- it's the basis of their whole businesses.
Alright I get your drift but that was just an observation. It's really not my problem if you're affected that way. If it does help I edited my comment.
Haha, no...I'm American, I just thought it was an interesting story. A few weeks ago , CNN had a good gallery of foreign startups and I though it was interesting how we get so caught-up in the valley we sometimes forget that there are things going on outside of it that can have huge impacts.
The more possessions you have the thicker the prison walls constructed around ones life. Minimalism creates freedom.
Oh yeah I saw that too! that was awesome wasn't it? I liked the Yelp clone Burrp! I've signed for the service and started browsing the entries.
Cringley mentioned the precariousness of Google's position as the #1 search engine. I switched away from google to search.yahoo.com months ago. Every now and then I run queries on both and I am consistently getting better results from yahoo. I'm failing to remember the specific examples, but twice in the last week google failed to provide a relevant link on the first page at all but yahoo succeeded.

Has anyone else found that google search has degraded?
Why being a good Second Life citizen might not be a good idea
Use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. SQlite in a production environment on anything but the most database-light site ever will make you cry.
YC News traffic has propped up our Alexa ranking [stats]
Before submitting a "a pic of our start-up [pic]"
our Alexa one week rank was slightly over 1 million.

After submitting our Alexa rank in the past few days has jumped to 320 000 and now 295 803.

This was a result of about 700 unique visitors from YC News which also resulted in about 50 sign-ups for our release.

Mark
The telephone companies.

Google is a stack of contracts and IP; they're made of very ephemeral stuff. The telco's have enduring physical assets. Now, some P2P wireless topology might eventually kill the telco's, but I doubt it.
Aston, you kick butt.
Amazon Taking on Paypal and Checkout
Nice I was working on the same idea a few months back. Is this like Viaweb?
No, it's redundant but effective.
Google Trends: facebook, myspace. Note how well Facebook fares in Canada.
TechCrunch Interns' 10 Favorite Facebook Applications
That's what concerned me. There is only one link and that is to email them an application. No other names associated and parts of read like marketing mumbo-jumbo.
actually, I believe kulveer and harj (boso now auctomatic) applied with no technical skills and got accepted. they have now hooked up with pat collinson etc.
I just discovered an article about it: http://gigaom.com/2007/04/25/hitforge/
I believe they also rewrote again just recently, and that's why Reddit hasn't seen new features for awhile. But perhaps they can afford it since they've been acquired.
hmm... I'm working on something similar with a social bookmarking spin on it, with some borrowed elements from News.YC.
Okay, okay, you took my specific examples and hammered them into the ground. I probably muddled up what I meant. Look at the whole picture.. YC companies intrinsically create value for users, not show ads, as their primary function. What that means is, I doubt any of them are going "Okay, what can I make to show off these awesome ads?" Instead they're going, "Okay, how do I make this useful to a large number of people?" Then when they've accomplished that, only then do they think about ads. Reddit was a perfect example. They didn't even put ads up 'til post-acquire. Yes, ads are a bodily function for web startups, but it is not their primary function.
Bezos to Wall Street: I told you so.
Indeed. I have a box in my basement with an incomplete set of work for school since grade school and other junk. Each individual piece is pretty useless, and has low sentimental value. The box is easy to store.
Growth is out, Scale is in
Yep, moved here a year and a half ago from the east coast. Love it here.
You're right. Someone went on a downmodding spree.

I restored your karma. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do...
Thats actually nice to hear for a change. Congratulations.
Scale Your Website Like YouTube - A Look at YouTube's Architecture
Apple rumor becomes a stock reality
I think we choose Flex for following reasons of Flash
1. Components are far more improved
2. Data integration is lot better
3. Charting components

I found a good article for comparision
http://www.flashmagazine.com/1061.htm

I hope this answer your question. Btw : Did you like the concept ?
~Flashback to 2002~

"Hey Paul, I keep getting all these junk email messages and they're filling up my inbox!"

"You're right. Someone went on an emailing spree. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
~Flashback to 1995~

"Hey Paul, my programs keep crashing and never get updated!"

"You're right. Someone went on a desktop software spree. Now I'm going to have to write some software to prevent this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://www.paulgraham.com/first.html
New Study: 50k software engineers making at least $50k a year had over $2,500 million in 2006 revenue
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/...
Sorry, meant to say c'mon. :)
Amazon Architecture - Early and latter years lessons
An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard
What does ClutterMe.com do? There's no 'about' page.
Entrepreneurs Have to Balance Legwork With Homework
Downmodded as irrelevant to startup news.
Thanks for restoring my karma everyone.
Downmodded for being mean, and you only joined two weeks ago. Who are you to say?

Edit: I apologize for not sensing teh humorz. It was not so blatant.
>> "At a guess I would say most good developers will no longer willingly program in PHP"

-- Please explain? Personally, I don't have a big problem with it. Every language has its pluses and minuses. However, what language do you think most developers are interested in ? Also remember that this is not silicon valley.

Also, if you have better ideas, I'm open to it. We need to pick a platform for sure and not to it like Boulder and get everyone there and disappoint some people and ask them to code in something they have never used before.
~Flashback to 1993~

"Hey Paul, this C++ code takes ten thousand lines to get anything done and keeps doing a fandango on core!"

"You're right. Someone went on a blub spree. Now I'm going to have to show people how to avoid subjecting themselves to this kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://paulgraham.com/onlisp.html
Well, a novel is less likely to be rereadable than, say, _ANSI Common Lisp_, because you'd use the latter as a reference. I sometimes reread novels, but only the really especially good ones, if I remember that I've read it before. In general, I don't read novels for perspective, though it's really nice when there's some to be gained, rare though that is.

I've probably read somewhere around 10K books, the vast majority of which were novels, and way more than half of which were not really worth reading had my time been as limited as it later became. When I was a teen, it was easy to finish two or three books a day of stuff I'd throw against the wall by chapter two, now. The fact that I've read it and finished it is no indicator of worth. :)

Anyway, I used to own a coupla thousand books, but after moving several times without having looked inside most of them, it dawned on me that carrying around all this dead tree was not very useful.
i wish kathy sierra was still blogging.
Coding Horror: The Software Imprinting Dilemma
Very interesting article, it's good for entrepreneurs who are wondering what will happen when (of course ;-)) their websites start getting hammered with traffic.
>Crystal ball into future<

"Hey Paul, I am getting all these requests from YC clones to apply to their program."

"You're right. Someone went on a cloning spree. Now I am going to have to do something to prevent this kind of kind of abuse. Great. As if I didn't have enough to do..."

http://y2combinator.com/
It won't be anywhere near as complicated. All I have to do is not display down arrows on comments over a day old.
I actually have a little free time now while I let a professional designer loose on some of my pages. Just post the source to news.yc and I'll send you a patch.
They own a ton of physical infrastructure.
Mom entrepreneurs need to get over themselves
Discovery Buys TreeHugger, $10M
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/facebook-is-back-th...

wasn't just an outage...
Startup gives virtualized twist to mobile computing.
he software enables computer users to access a digital image of their desktop files, applications, settings and security policies through a USB 2.0 memory device. The untethering of the corporate desktop from the hardware that runs it promises to get companies out of the business of provisioning PCs, an expensive proposition for organizations with large distributed workforces, and allows employees to do business securely from any computer with a USB port.
What to do when you are waiting
"In 1958... psychologists let groups of four people brainstorm about the practical benefits or difficulties that would arise if everyone had an extra thumb on each hand after next year."

Wait.. What?

The power of brainstorming is apparent when two people are thinking about something they will both use. If it's directly useful to both of them then two heads are about four times better than one, if not closer to ten times better.
From the comment, from Mark, below this artilce, it looks like they're positioning themselves as a better facebook.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/facebook-is-back-th...
The Flip Side of Entrepreneurship
"Reddit was a perfect example. They didn't even put ads up 'til post-acquire."

Reddit had ads before the acquisition, it's just they ran infrequently enough that most users never noticed them.
Look, that is so not my point. My point is, YC companies create value, not serve ads.
I think this is a re-invention of relatively well-known ways of optimizing databases. still interesting to read about however.
Upmodded for not sensing blatant sarcasm.
Your technique might get you through college fine, but to become a truly great writer one must write and rewrite, not because anyone demands it of you, but simply because one cannot imagine it any other way. Same goes for other artistic forms.
South African facebook users' profiles and messages left exposed
"FP is a real competitive edge for a company" - The commercial potential of OCaml/FP [PDF]
There's something familiar about this approach. It reminds me of JMP vs. LJMP commands in processor instructions sets that had partitioned memory sets. Or had a JMP command that was distance limited (often to +/- 32k).

Effectively, sharding takes advantage of the locality of information. As soon as you need information outside of that locale, you need to make a more expensive request.
The Secret Formula for Maximizing AdSense Revenues
adsense, adwords, google, online business
I did some of these, wish I'd done some of the others, and have one more to add:

12. Hone your technical skills, particularly in the area you hope to be working in.

When I joined my employer, I figured I'd make sure I gave them 2 years of solid work, then I'd start doing side-projects and if it looked like one of them had promise, I'd quit and pursue it. So I purposely did my best to work on absolutely commercially useless stuff for the first year. I learned a whole lot about compilers, a whole lot about type systems and purely functional data structures, a whole lot about Haskell and Scheme, but very little about dynamic languages or the libraries available for them. I got some practical knowledge from my job, but it turned out to be less transferable than I'd hoped for.

As a result, when a friend came knocking with "Hey, you wanna start a startup" after only a year, I was far less familiar with the technology we'd be using than I would've liked. I was pretty fluent in two webapp technologies (PHP and JSF) that I knew I didn't want to use, but didn't have much practical experience in Rails or the Python frameworks that I did want to use. And knowing how to design and implement a programming language doesn't do too much good when you just want to use one.
Get Venture: Projections: Nothing To Stress About
XSLT : good? bad? outdated?
Is it a good move to use XSLT?Does it affect the performance in general? Do you personally prefer the use of XSLT? I would love to hear what the hackers here at news.y think about this.Any response would be highly appreciated.
GigaOM Launches the Future of Software - a month-long look at future trends in blog format
I think it is outdated. It is fairly complicated, but what really annoys me is the "entity" problem. That vision of passing a document through a series of XSLT filters does not work, because the defined entities get transformed after the first pass (ie something like &#160; don't remember correct syntax). Maybe I just couldn't figure out how to make it work though - which leads back to point #1, too complicated.
Bubble 2.0 coming soon
John Dvorak has a bad record spotting success stories. So if he is calling it a bubble... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Dvorak
If you can't downvote away people's karma, how do you make people who suck go away?
I can't believe I'm agreeing with Dvorak, but (generally) he's right.

Where he's wrong:

1. It won't be as bad as dot-bomb.

2. It has nothing to do with the type of product, and everything to do with investment hype and greed.
on the bright side, the US isn't number 1 in the amount of patent trolls...
Where do startup companies find employees?
We're looking for the best strategies for finding people for our startup. What have you found was the most effective?
SplashCast Bringing "Sexy Back" to Facebook
Ruby has Rails and Python has multiple mature web frameworks (Django is one of them) and both are much nicer to program in than PHP.

> However, what language do you think most developers are interested in ?

Java or C#, which is why that consideration is orthogonal to your problem.

> Also remember that this is not silicon valley.

Apropos of --?

As for the Boulder situation, my reading wasn't that nobody had used Java before, as you claim; but that "the Java platform" was the wrong choice for web development.
You should downmod the comments, not the person.

What's happening here is that troll decides he doesn't like startupgeek, so troll goes to the threads page for startupgeek and downmods every single comment on there.

If you think someone sucks, then downmod the sucky thing they said. Not all the non-sucky things.
A week might be more fair.
>And knowing how to design and implement a programming language doesn't do too much good when you just want to use one.

Knowing that stuff is always useful.
I guess downmodding people doesn't really do anything, anyway. I still have to see all the future stuff they write.

It would be cool if there was some way I could nuke people, so I wouldn't have to see posts or comments submitted by people like juwo, tracksuitceo, or one of guy kawasaki's sock puppets.
not a viable replacement, but definitely has it's place. it doesn't require a server environment.
The function of most of these sites is to acquire a large user base, so that it can later be monetized. Currently, the dominant strategy for doing so involves advertising, which means you want broad enough appeal to get large numbers of relative technical unsophisticates that aren't using AdBlock or similar.
How to monetize your web 2.0 application?
Free Ajax books
Ajax tutorials
Here is an longer article from the same company on their experience with OCaml: http://www.haskell.org/sitewiki/images/0/03/TMR-Issue7.pdf
Startups and Angel Investment
I'm starting a startup with clear methods of generating revenue and although I hope it becomes successful beyond my wildest expectations, I honestly don't have any clue as to how successful it will become and how many customers I will be able to get and how long it will take to get them. I don't think any startup can know these numbers.

I'm speaking with investors about receiving some angel funding. Without an accurate projection of revenue and expenses, how do I know how much of the company to offer them?
Play nice.
Are you in school or recently graduated? Try talking to your school buddies. Chances are they're at a stage where they don't like the idea of working for a big company anyway.

If you're currently working at another company, you can approach co-workers who are your friends. But be very careful with this... This could be used as evidence that you are violating an IP or non-compete agreement.

If neither of those works, might want to check out computer science career fairs at a few of the good universities. Some of the guys graduating could be quality hackers willing to take risk.

The traditional means recruiters use to get Sr people (like LinkedIn) might turn up people who cost too much (and generally suck), but could still be worth a shot.

Good luck.