skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Discover and share slideshows and presentations
Intro to Processing Online Credit Card Transactions
Is your application an ass-kisser?
Steve Jobs - Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 - "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish"
Some interesting things that happened today at Y-Combinator dinner:

1. On their way to YC dinner, they got stopped by the police.

2. Using my phone, I got to pass hi to Paul and Jessica and congratulate her on the book's success :)

3. I noticed that about 30 founders attended the dinner. From that, I am guessing there are about 15 groups funded this winter.

4. Some prank caller ordered five pizzas (three they paid for) at Justin's name :s

5. We got to see Trevor's awesome robot, live.
Is it effective to provide API with first version? We have this dilemma for our upcoming release of http://www.onista.com
Where does she get this constant stream of stock photos?
I was thinking a lot about this in relation to Digg last week. Digg succeeds in some categories, but a lot of the stuff that hits the main page is pretty generic. News.yc is an extremely niche community and the content is generally top notch in relation to the general topic (tech startups).

I've been thinking about how you would build a single website that captures these extremely niche communities (similarly to how news.yc captures its demographic) in a way that is better than just having categories (like Digg does).

That would be cool.
Creativity : Mystery is More Important than Knowledge
The human review would certainly cause scalability problems. Amazon.com already does PPA with their book referal program. For instance, they pay their ad publishers only when their users purchase a particular book through their site.
"3. I noticed that about 30 founders attended the dinner. From that, I am guessing there are about 15 groups funded this "
winter."

It'd be fewer. The mean founder count is surely greater than 2.
I watched the dinner and aftermath, including all the pizza prank calls and various other abuse. I didn't see an easily-accessible feedback link (note to other startup founders: include this), so I'll post my feedback here:

1. Congratulations. In two days, you have managed to create a community more fucked up than YouTube.

2. I started watching because of the outrageous stuff other viewers were doing. When you go to curb the abuse, be aware of this. Many of your viewers may be watching only because folks are doing stupid stuff like ordering pizza and making yCombinator pay for it. Lose the hassles and you may lose the audience.

3. Reality TV shows succeed because they're unreal. TV execs hype up and dramatize all sorts of conflict, because that's what gets viewers to tune in. Nobody wants to see an ordinary person's life, because it's boring.

4. Who do you want to be - Anna Nicole Smith or Paris Hilton. Your success in attracting viewers is proportional to how trashy you are willing to become. Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton remain media darlings because we can look at them and think "Wow, look how pathetic they are." It makes us feel good about ourselves. Unless you are similarly pathetic, people will not want to look at you. Respectable people like Tim Berners Lee or Steve Wozniak seldom end up on the news.

5. If you are respectable and still choose to go on reality TV, you're setting yourself up to be torn down. The justin.tv tagline is accurate: "An exercise in narcissism". Narcissism is going to prompt abuse. People think that since you've set yourself up on a pedestal, you've given them an opening to tear you down.

6. I initially had logged in watch the yCombinator dinner. That proved impractical because of the technology: the audio quality was shitty, the video would randomly drop out, and you couldn't really see anything anyway. Part of the problem for attracting a decent community is there's nothing for decent people to do. That leaves it as a festival for troublemakers.

7. Have you guys not read Shirky? Almost all the problems tonight could've been predicted from his articles. http://shirky.com/.

8. Lose the arrogance. Kyle was bragging about his 1337 MIT CS skillz in the chatroom. Emmett was talking about their being only a finite number of attack vectors, and he'd have them all patched in a week. In my experience, never underestimate the clever things people will do to break your system. People will still be finding ways to abuse it a year from now, assuming it still exists. The arrogance is just an invitation for them to try harder.

9. I won't be back, mostly because this is a complete waste of time. But I thought I'd give you the courtesy of telling you why I won't be back.
What's everyone's thoughts on justin.tv?
Maybe Google Wanted to be Sued: YouTube and Plan B
What would be better is a well edited documentary, comparing the two biggest start-up incubators Ycombinator and Techstars.

It would be a fantastic promotional documentary for all party's involved. Heck, you could even turn it into some kind of reality Tv show if your wanted to where the 2 incubators compete somehow. 1st season broadcast via Youtube + HD websites. 2nd season via NBC.

It's 1000x better idea for a show than this
http://www.iamtheprodigy.com/

its a reality based tv show where 2000 door to door summer salespeople compete to see who can sell the most, what garbage!! The people at Ycombinator and Techstars are the future leaders of the world! How much more interesting can you get!?

If your interested in this idea I will be in the Bay area March 22-27. JimmyReam@gmail.com
Dangerously addictive. I must have spent two hours looking at that site today.
I thought about that idea too. I definitely think that one of the 8 Y-Combinator teams should get a person to film the whole experience from start to finish. It seems like everyone on this news feed is dying to see how it all is done.
I'm not gonna lie I watched it a lot tonight. I really would have enjoyed it better if the sound was better though. It was hard to hear the speaker and a lot of the conversations. Wasn't Justin supposed to speak in front of everyone?
There are 13 startups this winter. But there were more than that at this dinner; alumni often come to dinners too. We probably had closer to 50 people here today. We actually ran out of food, so it was handy those guys sent us pizzas.
Why We Aren't Staying in the UK
Our start-up (i-conserve.com) looked around on the web, saw that most were partial copies of each other (as in, whole paragraphs verbatim), and decided to write our own, based on 4 or 5 we liked. We really liked the bare-bones approach most YC companies have, and tried to follow that philosophy when writing such legal documents.

Then we talked about to a local long-time entrepreneur, who said that is exactly what his lawyer did, and charged him thousands for it; in fact, it didn't turn out that great. So, save some money and write them yourself.
Seriously. I am getting close to writing a greasemonkey script or editing my hosts file before this becomes a problem.

Maybe you should worry that by funding justin.tv you've bankrupted future applicants of all their time.
news.YC/active
They'll get tons of VC money soon and they'll need it for the bandwidth bills. More people want to film their lives than want to talk into a fixed camera (i.e. YouTube). You need a little new hardware for this though which hurts.

Still, it will be huge. The next YouTube.
MySpace just went copy-and-paste: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3775
This is going to be a tough nut to crack.

What I can see working out is google setting some kind of conversion:cost metric. ie. if you average 1 action per 1,000 displays pay $10/action; if you average 1 action per 100,000 displays pay $500. It will be a challenge determining the initial conversion ratio. But by common logic - it might take 10,000 clicks for someone to buy a Merc online and Merc won't mind paying Goog $500 for it. Problem arises when a $40 product takes 2000 displays to get a sale.

Lots of setting standards, way I see it.
Seed funding for biotech?
No one does Y Combinator style funding for biotech because startup costs are so much higher than for Web 2.0. My biotech company is more like a Web 2.0 startup because I could take a company to profitability on $25,000.

I've applied to the local biotech incubator. Anyone have any other ideas for getting funding and mentoring? Do small business loans to buy capital hold the individual accountable for repayment?
It is unsurprisingly compelling. But the live chat and interactivity really made it for me. It's great to just idle in the room all day, pop back on the computer after some time and ask "So what'd I miss?"

The potential of justin.tv is just phenomenal right now. The platform that they've built is really going to change how entertainment is done.
Actually, it can work on the same principle as PPC, except the $/click takes time to work out (you have to send traffic to the site to determine how much revenue it gets you). Analagous to your example is Amazon biding $0.00001 per click - they would simply be outbid by sites willing to pay more for the keywords. The only difference is that with PPC there's a minimum - I think it's 5 cents, though it might have increased to 10 - but you can define an action as an extremely infrequent event. But that difference only comes into play when you've got no competition, and if you've got no competition for a keyword, it's extremely unlikely that it's going to be a lucrative one.

The key point is that Google figures out how much it makes by sending people to a site, and ranks the sites based on that metric. So just like Adwords, there's no getting around the fact that paying Google more (by bidding higher, or on more frequent events) will get you better placement, and therefore more traffic.
I think the police entering their apartment at 1:40 this morning, guns drawn, is going to make a classic moment for the archives.

I'll be honest, I was thinking I was maybe going to see Justin get shot.
Wow,how serendipitous. I'm hoping next time the pizza will show up to Justin's apt(two floors below mine) with the bill prepaid and a 24 pack of Sam Adams to boot.
Well Google can always put unproven sites on the backburner, sending them very little traffic. 10,000 clicks to sell a Merc is a good point, though, it would take forever. Maybe they could do a backburner system but you can pay to jump the queue? Almost defeats the purpose.
Well, maybe you could let your users answer that one for you by putting an SDK page up with 'coming soon - email us for a beta test' and tracking hits/emails. You'll probably change so much after launch that you don't want to be stuck trying to support API 1.0 so unless you get a lot of requests for it , it's probably a bad idea.
I've been using this page pretty often for the last couple days and it's worked well. Will we see a link on the the main page soon, Paul?
Excellent. To me, the real value (or potential value) of this site lays in the discussions centering around the links, rather than the links themselves, so I'll probably be using this as the default view from now on.

Might be an idea to make this view contribute 25% to the ranking of the main view as well? Quite a few decent discussions with few votes have popped up, so it might be a good idea.
Amazon's is just an affiliate program, no? That's kind of the opposite of what Google is doing.
The Life of an Entrepreneur, in 33 Seconds  (no substance, just fun)
Depends on your target audience. What do your users want? If you don't know, ask them -- not us! (And if you don't have any idea who your target users are, you have a bigger problem than the API...)
One day after launch and there's already gold moments like these. It was bad that I kept thinking "Whoa, this is going to make an awesome YouTube video later" as guns were being pointed at them.
It shouldn't be a priority for your first version. Get it out there so people know what you can do first.
Those photos are awesome, especially the Just-Trust-Me Guy. I can think of a couple apps for The Show-Off...
[???] : hoofbeats

Very fitting; never viewed it with an entrepreneurial POV before. Okay, I admit I voted this up because Aladdin is one of my two favorite movies. I may have revealed too much...
I love how you used JamGlue to post the music track. Y Combinator companies feed so well off each other. I should remix the jamglue track and add some yc flava!
Do it! But I noticed the same thing. The network of YC companies seems tight. The YC front page is using HeySan for the slide show and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the pics were edited with Snipshot.
'... To me, the real value (or potential value) of this site lays in the discussions centering around the links, rather than the links themselves, ...'

yes exactly. but alas it never seems to happen. the links are really just points of interest that attract good ideas, comments or insight. This was the heart of slashdot, perlmonks et., al.

I don't trawl sites for links, I trawl them for the "insight, opinions and ideas on the links".
First-Ever Mobile GPS Widget Platform Debuts
'... I am not talking about silver bullet. I am talking about alternatives. For now people largely think that ther is only one way to do it. The point of my article is to show that there is more than one way to do it and that it might pay off to think about this before hand if you have to make a living of a web-based service ...'

I totally missed this in the article mickael. I'll go with TIMTOWTDI [0] anytime. I'll go back and read it again :)

Reference

[0] TIMTOWTDI, 'there is more than one way to do it, perl motto"

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=52073

[Accessed Wednesday, 21 March 2007]
Go Big or Go to America (the attitude of the UK internet scene)
News.yc peeps - i urge you to read this, particularly the comments and let me know what you think. Some of this as a young internet entrepreneur in the UK really disappoints me. I know Kulveer and Harj feel the same and are not conveyed in a very positive way in the piece.
On the positive side though, I do believe it will only take a few tweaks to the site (for instance adding active discussions to the weighting that determines the front page order) and maybe 30-40 regular contributers to get the critical mass for discussions going. I've noticed regular contributors such as Alex3917, python_kiss, rms and danielha (and of course pg) are constantly making valuable comments, just a few more guys like them and I think we'll be set.
I'm planning on vlogging my startup adventure, not quite as good as a proper documentary but its cheaper
"The last thing that the London internet scene needs is inexperience, deluded individuals raising cash and burning it. That isnÂt the road to a sustainable industry."

I thought this was funny. How do you go about building the net experience of an ecosystem without letting people go out and do stuff. Without starting off with no experience there are no inputs into the system. The other key problem is understanding that failure and experimentation are net positive inputs into the ecosystem here. It gets harder with this sort of attitude :( For an environment to reach a stable equilibrium between large successes and failures - we need more people to fail and use that to become successful. Here, smart hungry people are made outcasts for having no experience.
Did that happen? I'm jumping into the archive palyer now. The ability to rewind to any point in justins life is amazing :)
Cops enter Justin's apartment with guns drawn. Internet pranksters are MESSED up
whoa, seriouly what did i miss there!? Why did the police enter the apartment?
How I made 6 figures with Google Adsense in 10 days
I love it and I'm rooting for them big time.
What the hell. Do people not realize they're messing with other people's lives? Sociopaths...
And this is after two days with only 100 viewers at any given point. How is this thing going to scale? It's kind of funny once when some psychotic fan tells the cops that Justin knifed a guy, but how about when some psychotic fan shows up at his apartment with a knife?
From the FAQ: "Apollo 1.0 will not be available on Linux. We plan to release Linux support shortly after the 1.0. release. While we had originally planned to support Linux in the 1.0 timeframe, we have had to wait on the core Flash Player's support for Linux to be finalized."

Well maybe if they had more than a single Linux Flash developer it would have been finished quicker. Watch them use this same excuse to push it back even further.
you may be interested in this then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon
The ever-eluding Web 2.0 definition
Grouptivity, stripping and sharing Web content
I'm thinking WB feels that way because he's super smart and a lot of complicated things really are simple for him. He's able to see through to the root of problems where others get distracted by the noise.

Reminds me of this one from PG: "I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent."
GStock - stock market analysis "2.0"
This is the kind of thing that you should probably not spend any time on. Risk is the name of the game and this is one of the smallest.

It might even be riskier post copy/paste legal documents. Because you're not a lawyer you don't know what ramifications it could have on any future litigation.
Posted them here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5313 before this thread was open.
Excellent. I had a lot of fun watching the tail end of the YC dinner last night.

I don't think they'll have any trouble getting publicity, considering all Justin has to do is tell all the live viewers Digg a link to his show at a certain time. :-)
rms - be interested to find out about your biotech project as i'm a biochemist/infectious disease PhD by training (but internet entrepreneur by experience). Email me.
ourdoings.com "Agrees not to use or disclose your personal information, or the personal information of others who use your site, without permission for any purpose other than providing and improving this service, except as required by law."

If someone breaks into the datacenter and physically steals the server (a more realistic scenario than the server being hacked) I don't think that would count as "disclosing". But I'm in Massachusetts where courts seem to have a higher-than-average degree of common sense.
There was a documentary done about one of the dot-com busts in 2000. I can't remember the title, but Google may be able to help you.

The problem is that most of work starting a startup is boring. So either a documentary distorts what actually goes on and shows you the interesting parts (like the one above), or you lose interest and forget about it.

My day basically goes:

1. Wake up. Start development VM. Check yCombinator. Reply to a post or two while VM boots up.

2. Implement a feature, or some administrative script, or setup some software package on server, while eating breakfast.

3. Go to day job. Work on somebody else's startup for 8 hours. Use breaks etc. to resource technologies I'll need for that night's programming.

3.b. Sketch out some feature longhand in a notebook on the train home.

4. Come home. Implement the low-hanging fruit that I just researched.

5. Eat dinner

6. Spend 2-3 hours working on some of the larger tasks that need doing.

7. Repeat.

It's pretty productive, but hardly good TV. The documentary would basically be "Jonathan staring at computer. Jonathan staring at computer. Jonathan staring at computer."

I am keeping a blog (poorly - been 2 weeks since I updated) with the day-to-day stuff. But really, that's just "Here's the challenge we just faced. Here's how we solved it. Rinse, lather, repeat."
It is free but you need to RSVP on their wiki page. They'll have a name badge waiting for you.
Did the post get pulled?
8 Web to Mobile Tips
It's very, very cool. I'm in Canada, and it felt like I was at that party.

I kept having the strange urge to talk directly to people like pg, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, as if Justin were some kind of Telepresence bot, or medium. It's weird to think of him walking around, with all these "spirits" in his head.

The robot demo was fascinating, and I love the unscriptedness. I think I prefer that to an edited or scripted documentary. You can infer a lot from the raw data that wouldn't make it through the editorial process.
How much of a role will distributed computing play in the continuing evolution of web-based software? Has this method of user involvement been overlooked by web startups or is it just not applicable to many 2.0 products?
gapingvoid: edelman talk
I can't see anything...
Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Comparing Cost of Internet Video Distribution
toomuchimagination: An offer you can't refuse
Yeah Sun had that in mind when they made Java EE.
The documentary is probably startup.com
Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos
They're getting up to 350 viewers in the evening now. Not bad for 2 days. Wait until they hit the mainstream media and then things will get scary
Apparently someone used a teletype service (intended for the hearing-impaired) to call police and report a stabbing. Police arrived with guns drawn.

( These teletype services are frequently used for credit card fraud as a way for the perpetrator to remain anonymous. )
I'm as optimistic as anyone and hope they do get a lot more attention, but let's not ignore the fact that they're still living off the post-launch high.

It remains to be seen if they can move people from novelty to loyal viewers and how big the audience is for this particular show. I'll definitely be tuning in regularly. Hell, I'd pay if they keep the quality good.
Great submission! for those interested in a mobile startup such as I here's a more comprehensive list http://jonathangrubb.blogspot.com/2007/03/8-ways-to-mobilize-your-web-product.html#comments
Video of last nights YC dinner (including cops, robots, pizza and more cops)
I don't think their business model is reliant on THIS show being super-sucessful-- they're building a platform to sell to other folks who want to do live video over the web. Think Paris Hilton and porn (not necessarily two different markets).
Guess I missed it the first time around... still, kind of a neat idea.
Thanks for the link jamon. I'm considering setting up something like YC news but for articles about mobile. What do you guys think? Currently the only reliable place for mobile info is carnival of mobilists.
Screw paris hilton, I want my own channel!
This is EXACTLY what I've been saying. To me, thats just a testing/proving ground. Get some buzz about the idea, and then try to license it to reality tv shows/celebs/iraq war reporter/hot girls/anything else thats more entertaining than startup founders.
Morph of a Nerd CEO -  How Hard Will You Work?
awwww, I miss that movie. :(
Gordon Bell - The man with the electronic memory
Jaxtr - Click to Call for your Customer Service
How is this different from affliate? It's all CPA (or PPA, if that's what they've decided to call it). I guess in this case you're not paying based on the actual value of the sale, you're paying based on what you bid as the actual value of the sale...

I see this as Google getting into the affilate marketplace, and integrating the adwords buying (which many many many affiliate marketers use) and affiliate payout into one financial transaction.

Hmmn, thinking about this more, it's actually cutting out the middlemen in a vast number of affliate transactions-- those that are entirely reliant on adwords buys instead of eyeballs coming in through a particular publisher. Now you can buy affiliate clicks on Google's entire network, instead of cutting individual deals with lots of sites and dealing with the administrative overhead of managing affiliates.

Smart.
hey, can we add this to the top nav bar so I don't have to bookmark it separately?

and maybe show on the listing page how long ago the last comment was?
Digesting Google's New PPA Advertising Product