skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LOL....true, but I think each point was a separate theme. I think author didn't mean all of this happens at the same time.
VC Firm AppFactory To Boost Facebook, 50 awards from $25,000 to $250,000.
How To Actually Get Hired For Your Blog
I tried endlessly to get other jobs using mainly my trusty resume. Talk about disheartening! I got almost nowhere and wasted way too much time and Crane's watermark paper. I should have started a blog! Since I started this blog I have met the most interesting people, people I have a great deal in common with. I've also had people contact me about my online marketing services. I think this is amazing considering the few short weeks this blog has been up.
Microsoft's 'Cloud OS' takes shape
Organize your domestic life on the Web: ChoreBuster
Second open Linux phone goes on sale
Microsoft's Surface PC still beyond developers' reach
The Web in 1994 (Video)
New Web site encourages firms to report corruption
Researchers try Google approach to understanding photos
Democrats criticize AT&T's exclusive iPhone deal
Tailgate: Ad banners as interactive flash apps; purchase w/o clickthrough
This is exactly the kind of comment that drags down reddit (and digg and slashdot). If you disagree with something, refute it instead of just calling names.
37signals crew are accepting questions about their business
It's not like exclusive deals are rare in the mobile world. All the carriers have exclusive deals with device manufacturers:

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&ST...
http://www2.sprint.com/mr/news_dtl.do?id=17002

Apple just turned this habit against them by making a device that's really good.

Are these politicians that clueless, or are they as in the pockets of the other cell carriers as they sound? Either way, this is an object lesson in why politicians ought to
be kept away from the technology business.
I remember that.

I also remember buying my first PC around that time - probably in 1992 or 1993. It included an OEM copy of MS Encarta, which seemed like a pretty useful app at the time...
I think this bears repeating: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30836

Facebook isn't the place to make money, the same way pets.com wasn't. Anyone that lived through the first dot-bomb should be able to see that.
I'm skeptical that the casual shopper would buy directly from a remote banner without clicking through and checking if the online store is legit,
$50 Million isn't nearly enough for 15.8 billion pageviews.

There's a lot of overhead cutting down the profits there. (Probably why there's an IPO rumour.)
Internet Startup Teams: 14 Essential Qualities for Each Founder & Team Size
Any other qualities you think are essential? I am trying to make this list as comprehensive as possible while keeping the qualities significantly independent from each other.
You can try to get people to look at ads in a different way, or you can accept that ads aren't the best way to generate income in an over marketed world and look for some other income source.

I think it's always safer to do the latter.
A VC: Web Services As TV Shows
The Good Ol'Days (1990s) were never that Good
Did 99% of websites really have the same background color?
Promises, Problems and Product Development (Global Moxie)
"Find the way to solve a problem that the customer has absorbed as a fact of life, a pain theyaEURXve borne so long they donaEURXt even realize itaEURXs there anymore."
What ever happened to Digital? I remember seeing them up until the late 90's but not really after that.
Stay away from comVentures and Roland! They screwed FilmLoop and Nishan Systems too! Here's some more info:

http://venturebeat.com/2007/02/13/filmloops-demise-the-reput...

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=43685

One commenter in this article on Zantaz offers a list of VCs to avoid:

http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/06/zantazs-375m-payday-and-th...

"ComVentures/Roland van der Meer, Crescendo/Spreng, Worldview/Orsak and Wei have similar operating approaches as reflected in the cases of Zantaz, Nishan, Force 10 and other Worldview deals."

Fellow entrepreneurs, beware! Wolves are out there. In today's age, it's easy to vett these VCs.
Small before big
It puzzles me that apple did not release the iphone non-carrier specific (unlocked). They would have made a killing. They still could... or just wait until someone figures out how to unlock it.
Hehe, Encarta. I used to spend hours on MindMaze.
This was pretty interesting, though I specifically enjoyed this quote: "A lot of what Windows was doing early on was memory management, storage, all of the things today we take for granted," Hall said. "The vast majority of developers (today), they are not thinking, 'how am I going to store this particular piece of data in memory?' It just happens."

It might just happen, but it would probably be useful to know at least in principle how and why it happens. From my experience, a lot of developers have no clue whatsoever.
Even if that's true, that wouldn't be the first time someone made a boatload of money by doing something technically trivial. cp is hard for normal people to use, so throw a nice GUI on it and you end up with Veritas (backup software providers) and these guys.
UK police do livecasting
They didn't have a background color. That beige is just whatever Mosaic's background color was set to, I think.
I'm also slightly amazed at the willingness of developers to create apps for the Facebook platform, since it's closed and controlled by a single corporate entity.

Have people forgotten (or are too young to remember) the days when MS completely dominated the development platform, and the economic consequences for 3rd party software companies?

The web app revolution is supposed to be all about breaking out of that pattern (which is why MS fought Netscape so hard).
Their results of being able to cut objects out of images and insert other objects into images with environmental color/light/scale integration is really impressive.
I remember my first exposure to Lisp was in an introductory Artificial Intelligence class. The grad student taught the first lecture and was instructed to give us a basic overview of Lisp. The guy, who could barely speak English, gave us a tutorial that could've been entitled: "Lisp for Java Programmers".

It was probably a combination of the broken English and java-to-lisp examples he gave us that created a deep hatred within me.

It took me the better part of the semester to get my head around functional programming. I had to learn to think differently and look at problems differently. I'm now a happy Lisp hacker and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.
How to advertise effectively on Facebook
The guys who are the subject of this article currently run Y Combinator startup Auctomatic. http://www.auctomatic.com
It's more than just "cp": you have to be able to index and search all that data (including attachments) to make it useful for legal & regulatory reasons, and that becomes less than trivial when dealing with upwards of a million emails per day.
Thanks for the lively discussion! I get better comments on ycombinator than I do on my own blog!
You're all Cash Money Superstars.
Yeah. I think PG might have changed his stance a little by backing these guys.
Bought by Compaq.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-207442.html
I agree with you, I think the only way that they might be able to get someone to buy through a banner would be if there was some direct tie to the to the page. The page content would have to say something like "you can buy the item we reviewed through this banner, the vendor is reliable".

I think it's still a bit of a stretch...
Extrapolating these little nuggets of wisdom to every situation is meaningless. For instance it simply does not apply to a startup that is looking to build something complex. And in that case you absolutely need to scale before someone else does and pushes you out of the game. Small before big does not make sense, unless small is a meaningful and reasonable number.
It looks like YC has a soft spot for services that bring desktop apps to the web. Snipshot,zenter, kiko, jamglue, buxfer.
Nothing beats instant user feedback
I might see this working if they push time sensitive deals that forces the ad viewer to purchase through the banner or lose out on a price break.

It would also have to be on products relatively ordinary and inexpensive. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense to purchase on the spot.
Just a "cp" command?! Heh... do you realize that some of the most successful startups in the recent history have been reimplmentation of various UNIX commands? Think about it for a second...
I read through the techcrunch comments and there were some valid points made... one that stuck out to me was one where a guy said he'd sign up for something but wouldnt buy anything.

I share that same feeling... I'd sign up for something but I wouldn't buy anything through it.
It could be done this way, but frankly, Abiword's Word importer isn't very good. OpenOffice's, while not perfect, is much better. Unfortunately, unlike Abiword, OOo doesn't come with a nice command-line utility for doing those conversions. OOo has a VBA-esque language that allows you to automate tasks like that, but it's a lot more suitable for more "interactive" purposes than as part of another app's backend.

Another thing to note is that some of Scribd's backend is written in C#. Maybe if your app is Windows based, there are Office API calls that let you do stuff like this. Just a guess, though.
recommendation: when I click get started, don't make the first thing you ask me be my zip code and gender. show me some results, and THEN ask me for the personal stuff.

though the claims sound interesting, nothing about your site compels me to take the time to figure it out.
Cosco's real secret is selling common household items less per unit but packaged in bulk thereby forcing the customer to actually buy more. A similar pricing structure in the online world is web hosting for only $7/month "WOW!! That's cheap!!!" ( your signup choices are $7/month for 36 months + $120 setup charge, $15/month for 24 months + no setup fee, or $20/month for 12 months + $40 setup fee) It's a strategy of getting the typical customer to spend more per sale.
I thought that Godin's point was that you need to make something one person will want before you can make something lots of people will want. If you don't have a useful product, it doesn't matter how much advertising or PR or scalability you throw at it, nobody will use it.

You need to scale before others push you out of the game, true; but before you need to scale, you need to have something worth scaling. A complex system that does everything for everybody and can stand up to a million users isn't worth anything until somebody finds it useful.
Time-Savers: Code Beautifier And Formatter
What would your friends and family think of your web surfing?  Find out without asking them! [pdf]
Let it Rain On My Web 2.0 Startup
9 essentials to getting and keeping users. Useful for any business.
There are many counterexamples to Godin's point, such as wikis. Wikis are useless with few contributors but extremely useful with many.

A secondary advantage (mentioned in pg's essays) is that you can more effectively take a "constant beta" mentality. Rolling a web app out to many users can certainly speed up the process of detecting bugs versus rolling it out to a few.
If you know RCS, you can look at the evolution of WWW software development from the end of 1994 until May, 1997:

wget http://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/www/RCS/brlewis.html,v
The 'Aha!' Moments of Lisp
They aren't, though - I've used Wikis for teams of as little as 2 people. In fact, I'd argue that Wikis are more useful with few contributors: the sweet spot seems to be in the range of a couple dozen regular posters, and they tend to deteriorate (unless rigid procedures are put in place, like with Wikipedia) as the community grows beyond that.
"and can stand up to a million users isn't worth anything until somebody finds it useful."

Often times it takes a team and not an individual to build something somebody wants. The complexity lies in its functionality and it does not have to do everything for everybody.

If I am not mistaken you are referring to scaling production and marketing and possibly premature diversification while I am referring to scaling development to meet the needs of that initial customer base.
It would be funny if there was a video about facebook. "This is Facebook. You can connect with your friends and see what they've been up to. Imagine the possibilities." - 2006.

Ten years later, the young people who would then be in their mid-20s would laugh at the people who did not realize its potential when they were 15. Duh!

To most of us, the web is obvious, and even Google seems obvious because many web portals and web directories existed with search ability--Google was just making it better--but to think of Facebook being huge is just not obvious to us. But, to the 14 year olds growing up, Facebook and MySpace are important for many things where Google is just good for researching stuff and images for school, and Wikipedia is good for getting basic information for school projects. In other words, I don't think most young people care about Google's apps other than search. (Sure, they might use Maps, but via embedded javascript in Facebook and MySpace in the future, and the Treos and iPhone come standard with a native GMaps application already.)
general atlantic are a bunch of buffoons, for sure. of course what philip never mentions is that he personally did the deal with GA because they were offering the most money.
Agreed, then. But I don't think Godin's talking about what you're talking about. He's a marketer: his point is about trying to get a million customers before you've built something that one customer will use.
A small base of contributors to a wiki may be OK for a very specific domain, but as the subject area broadens, you will certainly need more contributors or you risk having very superficial contributions on some of the subjects.

Anyway, if you don't like the wiki example, what about Digg or Reddit? How about a dating site? Something like epinions?

The notion that a product that isn't useful to a handful of users won't be useful to many users clearly is not one-size-fits-all.
PG: What's your current take on reddit's comment system?
While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that the community is more important than the tool.
While reddit's comment system is obviously an improvement over Slashdot's, I'm increasingly convinced that community makeup is far more important than the tool it uses.
Incidentally I came across this while trying to find information about how reddit stores threaded comments. I've read they use postgres and while I've also read about many workable techniques to force hierarchical (and frequently reordered) comments into a relational db these solutions all sort of make me cringe. I'd welcome anyone's ideas here as well.
By default Mosaic's background was gray, and most people didn't change it. (Using #x0000ff was reasonable for links on this gray background.)

White became the default background for more sophisticated sites in 1996. The first time I saw Yahoo and Amazon they had gray (i.e. probably no) background color.

http://battellemedia.com/images/1995-tm.jpg

(Notice how small it is too.)

We got so used to these gray web pages that for a few months I thought it was a crazy idea to make websites with white backgrounds-- that pages so bright would hurt people's eyes. Then I realized the real culprit was the default unvisited link color.
I did a quick and dirty forum a couple years back that now serves up hundreds of new threads a day (having tens, sometimes hundreds of messages each).

My solution was to store a comment thread in display order in the database with hinting as to how deep in the heirarchy the comment is. Optimizes for output, although with some cost every time something gets posted. Luckily, for most forums, views outnumber posts by hundreds of times.

The one issue that system has is that if you're doing a lot of reordering, let's say from quality scores. In that case you'll basically have to remake the thread after every post and after vote that makes a difference. Not recommended...
I agree, basically. Except I think customs are as important as or more important than makeup. That's why I try to discourage ad hominems.

To be fair to the reddits, it wasn't their fault that the discussion on reddit sank down toward that of digg and slashdot. They have really strong beliefs against censorship. They were never going to jump into a discussion and tell people to stop being jerks. But empirically it looks as if you may have to.

The optimistic way of phrasing this is: if you have good customs and existing users enforce them, you can probably survive the influx of 14 year olds when it comes.
i am in the process of making a news.yc clone... threaded comments are not as easy as it looks on news.yc.

[edit] especially when the comments get reordered on votes.
I'm told they get most of ATT's profit on the subscription revenue. They're not just selling the hardware. In effect they own the whole operation.
Reddit, at least, was useful back when it was just spez and kn0thing submitting all their favorite links to their own site. There was a lot of nifty information there. Comments and the community didn't come until several months later.

I suspect several dating sites grew in a roundabout way. HotOrNot.com, for example, started as a site where you could submit photos and rate them. The initial appeal wasn't dating, and they didn't even offer it at first. It was just a lark: how much time can I waste at work, and how attractive do other people think I am.

I don't know the history on ePinions, but it looks like they could've grown in a similar fashion. Send it out to all your friends; have them share reviews on the products that they buy. It's a distributed, asynchronous form of calling your friend up and saying "Hey, you know of any good DVD players?"

A couple more examples of businesses that people think need many users, but actually were useful to small groups in their infancy:

I joined FaceBook in fall 2004 when it was just beginning to expand beyond the Ivy League. There was no messaging, no status, no platform, and no photo-sharing (they did have The Wall and Poke). Instead, people used it as a glorified directory. Meet someone at a party, and instead of having to ask their contact information, you just get their name and you can look it up on Facebook.

When Ning started, it was supposed to be a platform for creating social networks. At the time, everyone thought a social network was supposed to grow really big, get millions of users, and then get bought out and make everyone rich. Ning never really took off in this environment, because in order to get big you have to start small, and the large number of social networks hosted on it meant that each individual network had to compete for the same users.

I just checked again after reading some of Marc Andreesen's blog entries, and the current Ning incarnation is very different from when I had a friend consulting for them. It focuses much more on niche social networks, providing an online home for groups that number in the dozens, not millions. And judging from Marc's recent blog entries, it seems far more successful than the original incarnation of Ning.
If you're trying to mimic this forum with a database solution, it's going to be a pain. PG's keeping this stuff in memory, almost certainly as the tree that it is.

edit on the edit: scratch that.
The one issue I have with the comments are they are not in chronological order and reorganize as new posts are added. It is annoying to figure which messages you have already read and which you have not since they are all mixed together. A simply chronological thread would be nice.
When a site begins as one incarnation with a small user base and later transforms into something else when the user base has grown, it suggests that critical mass is necessary to make the transformation happen. If HotOrNot started out trying to build a dating site, they'd have been foolish not to consider scaling early on.
Did anyone point out to the reddits that telling someone to stop being a jerk is not censorship?
The new Dreamweaver CS3 comes with a Spry menu widget, which is probably the easiest to use. You could download a demo here: http://www.download.com/3000-2048_4-10701454.html

jQuery has some really cool plugins, which include menu related. http://docs.jquery.com/Plugins

Or use some not so new codes from dynamicdrive.com: http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex1/index.html
Right, the point is that if HotOrNot started out as a dating service, they wouldn't have gotten any users at all. People join a dating site to find other users to date - they only find other users to date if the site already has users. So you end up with a chicken-and-egg problem where everybody is waiting for everybody else to join. I'm curious how other dating sites have solved this - my guess is that they either tapped a large network of friends or they recruited users from an existing singles community.

HotOrNot actually faced a terrific scaling battle anyway: http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/05/hong/. They got far more users by starting as a rating site than a dating site.
Web 2.0 is built on Open Source
The approach I took on Diffle (http://www.diffle.com/ - unfortunately it hasn't been exercised as we haven't really got traction yet) was to store the comment ID as a varbinary(255). A child comment takes the ID of the parent and then appends a 2-byte sequential number. So, the first comment is 0x0001, the second is 0x0002, a reply to the second is 0x00020001, a second reply is 0x00020002, the third is 0x0003, a reply to the third is 0x00030001, etc. To find the children of a comment, you look for all comments where the parent's ID is a prefix. MySQL can use leftmost-prefixes as indexes, so this computes very quickly. Also, with the standard varbinary collating order, 0x01 sorts before 0x0101, 0x0102, 0x02, etc, so all I have to do is order by the ID and everything will come out in proper threaded order. And nesting depth is calculated easily by len(id) / 2.

Reordering can be done just by looking at all records whose IDs contain the parent as a prefix and have a length 2 greater than the parent, and then renumbering them. This should be computationally feasible in most cases.

This does limit users to 65,536 replies to a single comment, and a maximum comment nesting depth of 127. Based on my experience with some very active LiveJournal threads, I considered these to be acceptable limitations (LJ limits comments to 5000/post anyway). A nesting depth of 127 would be nearly 2400 pixels over, so it's not like it'd all fit on one screen anyway.
That really interesting; your emphasis on community custom is not something I'd really thought about. You could even go so far as to classify reddit's innovations as an attempt to programatically encourage or enforce such customs. I wonder if you could take it further programatically. Off the top of my head you could go the email route and switch to a three button system for comments: "up", "down", and "troll". I'm guessing you can tell where I'm going from there: A Plan For Trolls?.
25 Startup Commandments: "You have to be wrong in the head to start a company"
Something simple to focus on to increase B2B sales
Making OpenID really really easy
I heard Simon Willison suggest this a while back. It's a great solution to get 'normal' users using openID now but it won't scale up. Perhaps the solution is to integrate openID with the browser?
On the right hand side of the screen, you can sort the comments chronologically.
Nokia launches mobile developer competition
Thank you. Never saw that before. That should be incorporated on YC News.