skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The genius of Facebook was getting students at elite universities to divulge lots of potentially profitable information for advertising. They did this because Facebook was an exclusive place just for elite college kids (and later just college kids). Now that its open to everyone it no longer has that value. I don't see how it can reasonably continue to increase in value (although they could certainly find a greater fool to sell it to).
Also, in Firefox on OS X some of the comments are gray and others are black. Why is this?
This was a pretty interesting watch, though I sorta had it going in the background while I did other stuff. The "we-wont-do-it-unless-we-are-having-totally-awesome-fun-100%-of-the-time" approach clearly needs to be taken with a grain (or pound) of salt, but I like to hope that it speaks to the power of being real excited about your products given they have definitely done a few things right with threadless.

The stress the motto "Your project is not good enough".
I like OK Cupid because of the word play in their name, just like the OK Computer album.
I work on speech recognition. What Blinkx is doing isn't novel. (Sorry, Blinkx.) Google has top speech researchers working on search for speech and video. Same for MSFT. Remember the Kai-Fu Lee thing? The guy who built CMU Sphinx, an open-source HMM-based speech recognizer, in the late 80s? He and many other solid speech people are at Google to work on searching audio/video.

And there are other companies in this space, but they tend to center around US gov customers. Virage is one. It's owned by the Autonomy group, where, according to the article, the founder of this company used to work.

There's also Podzinger, a subsidary of BBN, which is another company that gets a lot of gov business. Podzinger runs BBN's speech recognition system on podcasts and videos, and pipes the output to a search engine: <http://podzinger.com/>.

I could go on... And if people are interested, I'd be happy to post links to some relevant papers and tools.

To my mind 2 interesting things are going on here. 1) The company appears to be thriving by applying 20 year-old stuff from the lab to a new problem, in apparently no special way. (And that's not a bad thing!) 2) They got an article in the NYT business section to talk about Hidden Markov Models. Although maybe that's not so surprising, since hedge funds have recently started speaking out about using machine learning.
MySpace's success came in spite of their technology, not because of it. There's nothing technical at MySpace worthy of emulation. A real technology startup could have done much better.
The one thing this article screamed to me but isn't outright said is maybe you shouldn't be handing out the shares so liberally in the first place? I was wondering what others thought about this. Of course I say this as my ETS (Estimate Time to Startup) is a few months away....
Congrats for the good review, Jessica!
I was in Barnes and Nobles a couple weekends ago and the book was prominently placed in the business section; it's great that she is getting good in-store placement too.
The first link you cited is spot on. The authors are from Univ of Cambridge, and work on HTK <http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/>.

That paper is 10 years old. As I'm sure you can imagine, there have been improvements in the field since then. To be completely honest, I don't stay on top of search applied to speech, but the keyword you want is "Spoken Document Retrieval" (SDR). Ciprian Chelba and TJ Hazen do cool stuff in this area; they are giving a tutorial at ICASSP this year SDR.

An aside. Both of these approaches use the fact that when you process speech, you essentially form a graph of words (or phonemes). Paths through the graph represent possible transcriptions. So, since graph is a denser, richer thing to search than the transcript, and we've got graph algorithms sitting around, there are neat tricks you can do to build a search engine index for speech...

I've recently been reading some interesting work that uses locality-sensitive hashing to search audio. The Google speech people are presenting a lot of it at ICASSP this year. See this post for more, and chase the links in their papers for even more: <http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2007/02/hear-here-sample-of-audio-processing.html>
I'm not sure of the experiences from other early facebook adopting schools -- but my old school (Bowdoin College) was among the first -- and it's still like crack to them. Not as ridiculous as a few years ago, but it's still wickedly popular. And from my perspective the alum retention rate, as the article mentions, is very strong.

I think the genius of Facebook is not just the eliteness, but instead a new word I'll makeup called 'localness'. Facebook cordons off the scary, wild web and presents you with people that you know or could at least see yourself knowing or bumping into. Combine that with early entry into the social networking world, very strong and appealing UI, and yes, eliteness, and a few years later, you've got 18 million users.
Amazon working on database web service?
Who would you suggest emulating?
How MySQL Cluster works
Startup Nightlife: SF Beta
Idea: A Better Social News Site
If you are going to launch a startup, how many friends would you need?
Best and Worst Decisions (Part 2)
Oh boy, that'd be so useful for me. If I was using a Mac I would be all over that.
Tor Open to Attack! (pdf)
Yep, I just threw out a figure and later realised it was way off. It is definitly a fraction of $8 bill though.
If any of you guys are familiar with anonymous Internet systems, this is a really cool read. It basically outlines a possible attack against something like Tor by linking together paths of entry/exit to trace (identify) a user.

Tor was one of the items covered in a presentation on online identities that I did last week here on my campus.
That is interesting. So the question becomes; how do you put a value on a virtual place?
When submitting a link, sometimes I want to add a text in addition to the title. Usually I just add a comment in the discuss/comments section, but it'd be nice to have a field for that specifically.

This works especially well if you're submitting a link and want to add a remark about why it might be relevant for others to check out.
For the Uninitiated- When You _Really_ Want to Scale
Fox is short-sighted, non-technical, and greedy. They had to buy a start-up for over half a billion dollars precisely because they can't develop software themselves.

Some other company just needs to harness the third party sites and build a the big ecosystem MySpace is neglecting to build.
Novel insights of the social entrepreneur
FT Wealth Forum: Web 2.0 or Bubble 2.0?
His site is down: Google cache:

now it's up again nm
Anyone have any hands on experience with this?
I do. Erlang is a blast. It's a language/platform specifically developed to be very scalable and very fault tolerant- because it was designed for telecommunications systems. Here's a nice write up from some of the guys at Sendmail: http://www.jetcafe.org/~npc/doc/euc00-sendmail.html

It's not a particularly popular language (I guess no functional language is)- and has only started gaining traction the last few years. Which means nothing of course. It's a bit of an oversimplification, but to me Erlang is to pi-calculus what Lisp is to lambda-calculus.
It looks to be a good resource. I like the "Weekly Summary" as a quick overview of what's been going on at startupping. The wiki seems to be a good resource for specific areas.
I remember reading this in high school, for a book report. It is a great source of inspiration. I'm glad it's now online. Thomas Edison is also one of the historical figures I admire most. (An online biography here: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=217855 or here: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/820/820-h/820-h.htm)
FOUNDERS AT WORK FULL PDF
What's the actual problem with Apache? Do you suppose it
is running out of RAM in which to store thread stacks?

I wonder if old pre-forked process Apache would have done
better, since it's not so easy to trick it into consuming
infinite memory.
I get the impression that the success of a startup depends upon how much room is given for "constructive failures". By "room", I mean enough funding and a forgiving market.
O'r you could buy the book and support the writer..
Why is there no downvote option for links, only for comments? Some stuff legitimately needs burial.
Perhaps a button to mark a story as inappropriate? Like this one... pointing to a torrent for a book is a bit slimy.
What I find interesting isn't so much that the mean is around two, but how strongly the median is two. Are the benefits of having two founders over one (soundboard off each other, keep each other motivated) and problems of lack of focus and communication overhead of 3+ founders so strong that a startup of two is more likely to succeed, or is two just the most natural size for a startup to condense at?

I guess the other possibility is that the sample in the article is skewed to make a point...
@Forcicle- are you confusing this site with a warez site? the all caps title is lame too. If Jessica released it as a free PDF it would be another matter altogether. Have some respect dude.
great irony. just few minutes ago my hard copy arrived
I made the average some time ago for a successful domain name and its 6.5
Needless to say this won't help his startup's chances at YC.
From the amazon page for this book:
What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?

91% buy the item featured on this page |
6% buy Dreaming in Code... |
1% buy Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive... |
1% buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7) by J. K. Rowling

What could it mean? :)
(he finished this)
Nitpick. I noticed this is working now when you type two newlines, but when it's just one newline it translates into a space. I'm probably the only one who cares though...
Right, it's a strategy you could decide to use. The only downside is if you don't get acquired, you're forced to shut down.

YC's application asks both "How will you make money?" and "Which companies would be most likely to buy you?" so I was interested in finding out which strategy they're most likely to advocate in practice
Heh... mine too, along with a bunch of other recommended ones.

There's something kind of frustrating shelling out a bunch of money to read about people who already have a bunch of it, written by someone who has a bunch of it... sigh. Hope it's worth it.

(BTW, I expect other people to respect the licenses on the things I create, so I certainly wouldn't violate others' licenses, but still, sometimes it's a frustrating feeling).
You're welcome. (to the 21st century)
FOUNDERS AT WORK - FULL PDF
On Improving Schools
Bruce Eckel&#39;s Notes on Pycon 2007
Well how do you put a value on a place like Wall Street? It's not the number of people or the number of computers. It's what people do there and the amount of money flowing through. As someone said below, when you have this ability to datamine 18 million kids (in aggregate) then you're pretty much sitting on a mint. Every time one kid posts on another kid's wall, it's more data to feed into the system. College-aged kids are probably the most valuable demographic to marketers in general (not because college kids have the most money, but because marketers like marketing to them because it makes them feel young), and college-age kids who actually go to college are even more valuable because they have more money on average.
That's definitely part of it- they are heavyweight threads or processes (no matter how you configure it) (rather than lightweight erlang threads). I would imagine the bigger problem here, however, is context switching. Because Apache (and most other servers) use OS threading or forking, the entire state of the current process (let's say) has to be put aside and then restored later, maybe after only a few milliseconds- because the OS isn't going to presume anything about the state of that process. In Erlang's concurrency model it simply runs 20 (or so, I think- anyway some static number) functions and then goes to another process.

Because the functions are, uh, functional there is almost no state to save and restore when there is a context switch. Also because things like iteration are done with recursion- the 20 functions and then context switch doesn't get hung up on some loop somewhere. The faster the OS tries to keep switching between processes, the more overhead it introduces.

BTW, this is why in my opinion you don't see a lot of other systems duplicating this sort of concurrency model- because there are some language "limitations" (recursion only, for example) that make it possible.

Most apache, erlang, or kernel hackers would know way more about this than I do, of course.
I was at LeWeb3 and I witnessed Weebly's presentation at the startup corner. Overall of what I remember was that they guy that was presenting was prepared and knew what he was talking about.
Comparing to some other presenters who were lost, very stressed and therefore getting you tired and losing you, the difference was obvious. Yoono and Weebly were the highlights for me at the start up corner...

I was trying to find the video from the presentation...
www.vpod.tv has an archive with leweb3, but no luck
wait a second... is this pg? are you testing your anti-spam code?
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Forcicle
linked at the bottom of the main page. n/m
The average number of founders in successful startups doesn't mean much unless it is from a random sample of startups that have both succeeded and failed.

If you looked at a graph of the total dataset, what you'd see is that almost all startups with only one founder fail. So the reason the successful startups you list mostly have two founders may not be because two is the optimum number, but rather because two is the next smallest (and therefore most common) number after one. We can't tell without additional data.
Fun, games lead to making it big online
The name MyBlogLog makes me think of the lawyer in Arrested Development- Bob Loblaw (you have to say it out loud) :)
When Google buys your company- remember your customers
The Decline and Fall of the Palm Empire
:)

Ah- I looked it up. It's better than XP anyway http://tmsoft.com/article-genome.html
An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little
Ah yes, because posting it once isn't enough
Great illustrations :)
The difficulty of keeping everyone informed increases greatly when you go from 2 to three people, as you go from one communication channel to three. A small programming team can take advantage of easy communication to have better efficiency over a large team, and I imagine that the advantages are similar for all of the tasks in a startup. Because a startup is desperately trying to make itself successful before running out of money, efficiency is probably even more important and increases the chance of success disproportionate to the increase from having more people involved.
Definately return to the main page after editing a comment please. I think I hit 'update' 3 times before even thinking about why I hadn't switched back.
Here's my attempt at better social news: http://groups.google.com/group/forwarding-tree. You can try a fully functional service that works like this here: http://forwardingtree.com/
Last.fm Release Source Code IRCCat
Thanks for that palish. Wow, what a difficult sector though. I've worked with schools before and they don't have a lot of money- and when they do you have practically a year long sales cycle. So if I were to give you one piece of advice in that market- keep your overhead _very_ low if you want to make a profit! Oh, and sell the vision. It sounds trite but it is very important to your target demographic in particular- most are teaching because of the vision of the difference they are making and if you speak to that it will make a big difference.
Thanks for your insight jwecker, I appreciate it. One thing that is fundamentally different about what I'm doing is that I'm marketing to individual teachers, not schools. I believe that this may be the right way to go about this sort of thing; it leaves the decision up to the individual, instead of the school. Spending time with individual teachers will be very important too, and I'm genuinely interested in helping them save time.
Not to be mean but that blog you always link to is very spammy. Please either link directly to the source, or if it's your blog- dude- the whole page is ads until you scroll down! People just don't like it and it won't make you any money- at least not off of news.YC . Even if you're not a native english speaker- try to add some unique content and get rid of most of the ads if you want anyone to take your blog seriously.
If you could somehow involve students in virally marketing it to their teachers it could get interesting. Still, not a big market (especially when you factor in their spending power). If you're passionate about it, though, it's an area that can always use a lot of help and I really hope it goes well. Keep your overhead low and it won't matter how small the market is, and you'll be making a difference in the world.
Four unusual uses for Subversion
Is it not the case that a major motivation for doing your own startup is to pursue your own idea? So the question that needs to be asked is this: what is the probability that k people will collectively come up with an idea for a startup so that each person feels they have contributed sufficiently to this idea? Maybe for groups with sizes greater than two, this is pretty unlikely.
Jessica captured great material and didn't get in the way doing it. Each chapter was clearly focused on the target story, not Jessica's agenda. She did a great job facilitating the QA. This makes the book useful and enjoyable, and not a marketing voice for YC.
Thanks for the information and links. My background is in video and image processing, well originally multiple target tracking, sensor management, and sensor fusion, but now I work in biometrics and video analytics. Understood about processing the information into a graph.

Your point about Google raises one of the obvious questions about this company... if Google is doing leading edge research in this field it seems unlikely they need to buy a "video search destination" site employing lesser technologies, that is unless it gets really really big (i.e. YouTube). They might be interested in some deep technology, but my impression from the reading I've done and the links you've posted is that Blinkx is using standard well known techniques to achieve their results.

FWIW: I was applying Markov modeling to areas such as mission planning and modeling integrated air defense networks back almost twenty years ago now. We didn't call them HMMs, but there were some very similar ideas employed.
I think its forming. I don't have a startup in my pocket to address it, but I think consumers are being exposed to more identity issues today than they've ever been before. I think consumers are connected to the pain of identity as the net evolves. They see this in news regarding id theft and they feel the pinch on the browser trying to remember multiple logins or how strange it is that everyone seems to want their email address from the milk vendor to the place they buy shoes.

The pinch is on, the pain is there, the solution? No idea, but its definately not going away.
This article could be a chapter in the book How to Lie with Statistics.

It is clearly a biased sample, listing only "successful" companies but not the much larger set of unsuccessful ones. The "exception" of Excite thrown in with 6 founders, IMO makes the author's intentions (conscious or unconscious) clear since one would expect some argument about whether Excite was really a success in the end.

Then there is the question of what constitutes a founder. This isn't always so easy to define. How many people founded IBM?

Despite Thomas Watson being listed as the "founder" of IBM, it is hard to even answer this question since IBM was formed out of the merger of three companies before it was even called IBM. (http://www.answers.com/topic/history-of-ibm)

Several responders pointed out correctly that the number of potential communications channels rises as the number of founders increases. And while that's clearly true, it is also true that more founders means more mouths to feed early in the company's development. And to run any business you need to learn to manage communication amongst your team.

Finally, one has to be careful not to confuse correlation with causation. Just because Microsoft was founded by two people, doesn't mean that was the primary reason for their success. It might also have had something to do with who the two people were after all. ;)
Well, reaction time and being agile enough in general (like when pg talks about implementing a competitor's feature the night after a competitor announces it) also give you room. That can be institutionalized.
Every time I see this graph I am a little bit tempted to puke.

There is only the barest explanation of what the test means, and as far as I can understand the circumstances of the test are not like those typically encountered by web servers, even those under extremely high load.

On top of that, this graph measures performance, not scalability. So it's saying, if you really want to perform, where by "perform" we mean have 4000 HTTP server sockets open concurrently, use YAWS not Apache.

Whoop dee doo!
This one is probably related to the well known property of human short term memory which states that we can remember about 7 plus or minus one things. This is the reason that phone numbers are seven digits for example.
Paul Kedrosky: The Best Book for Startups
Seems like having fun at work is the whole point. We all are experiencing the blurring of work and home life. The Skinny guys have figured out that you build projects out of a personal need and enjoyment. Some stick; some don't. Apparently, t-shirts designed by their community sticks.

The video of their talk is decent enough quality. What they have to say about being part of their community is a nice take-away. I also liked how they treated those who try to game their system: They treat the gaming almost like a security audit. They learn from their community the system's weaknesses. Seems like an appropriate reaction rather than knee-jerking from one 'solution' to another; e.g., Digg.
Hmm, I see your point. Value/Users does seem to be meaningless by itself. You could reverse it around and say $440 is how much value they think they can derive from each facebook user. But that does not take into account any future growth and as long as facebook stays *the* college social network it's going to continue tapping into that valuable demographic.
We find two or three works best. One advantage of three is that you have a third person to defuse any dispute between the other two. But if the two founders have known each other long enough, like Emmett and Justin, you may not need that.
Fixed. At news.yc we have a plan for linkjacking: the editors
just replace the url with the url of the original source.
Dell prompted into action over open source
Having never started a startup, I wouldn't know, but how long does the average successful startup go without hiring more people? The number of founders pretty clearly only matters during that period. And, is that the hardest part of getting a startup off the ground? PG wrote that he generally hired people when none of the people already at the company could do the job themselves. Seems to me that if 3 people have incredibly much trouble communicating, you'd have a similar amount of trouble once there was too much work for two people and you had to hire another one.

What's different between the very earliest stages of a startup and the stage where you've hired one person?