skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hi, me too (chemist), working on some ideas in the energy field. i'm always jealous of web designers who can buy a $500 laptop, download a pile of open source software and start producing. i've got to raise at least two more zeros before i can actually do anything... ;-)
Don't try to fool Mother Google (Re: due diligence in acquisitions)
Problem with desktop apps seems to be crappy tools.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/InfectiousGreed/~3/115642924/intel_ceo_summi_1.html
Slide Reveals Big Stats (150 million daily views etc)
oh, i totally agree, far33d... those make for the coolest companies. anyone know anything about sensor networks? lately i've been thinking that a sensor network plus an accompanying web app could be useful in lots of domains.

for example, here's an idea that's been kicking around in my head. (i'm not the right guy to start this company, so i'll just throw out this there.)

you know how people at the gym often track their workouts -- "3 sets, 10 reps, 150 lbs" -- with pencil and paper? that's so 20th century. why not build a sensor network for exercise equipment? you get on a scale or weight/cardio machine. it knows who you are -- RFID in your membership card? -- and it wirelessly uploads your workout data from that machine to a server.

as a gym member, you get a login to an accompanying web app, which is automagically populated with your data. you can set goals, track your workouts + results with pretty graphs, etc. no more paper+pencil tracking -- just work out and log in.

sell this sensor/software platform to gyms (or perhaps the equipment manufacturers), and you've got yourself a business.

where does the internet come in? well, aside from the tracking app for individuals, with all this aggregate data, you'd revolutionize exercise science. is interval training really better than marathon cardio sessions? more weight+fewer reps, or less weight+more reps? even basic collaborative filtering would be cool: "people with bodies like yours got these results with this workout plan."

it'd disrupt the (absurdly lucrative) personal training industry.

point is, out there in the "real world," there's tons of data that's just waiting to be aggregated and analyzed. that'll certainly be the basis of many interesting companies.
Wow. This news really made me question how out of the loop I am with popular online culture. $20 million financing for a flash slide-show service? And 150 million daily views and 200K new slide shows created every day? This is definitely an opportunity I would have missed had I been a VC.

Of course, my ignorance may be due to the fact that I've only ever been on MySpace maybe twice and Facebook never so far. Guess I better get out more ;)
Has Overuse of Bayesian Analysis Screwed Google Search?
I believe the ad method described there is mostly unique to Japan. Most phones have internet access, and there are quick access keys to web search. The text box appears, and you type. So almost all ads involving websites show a text box with the keyword inside. I never looked into this, but I suspect vendors would pay for special keywords.

Meanwhile, I doubt a business model that applies to Japan would immediately be useful elsewhere. The extensive train system in Japan means that ads placed in trains are guaranteed to be seen, and passengers have their hands free to press buttons on their phones. On the other hand, USA is all cars.
My product is a game that teaches piano, but the delivery and monetisation are currently via the web.

http://www.free-music-games.net/valkyrie-invaders.html
Exact twitter clone in German gets funded
Facebook's core value proposition is in organising the information around you. Secondly their objective is to maximise user retention.

So if a startup can build a product leverage facebook's network effects which falls outside of facebook's stated mission but can serve to keep users glued to the site it can do something of value that Facebook is unlikely to replicate.

For example see MosoTo - they are doing things on facebook that facebook aren't doing because it falls outside of its stated mission and so would be deemed a deviation from its product (chat + photo and media sharing).

For Facebook hackers out there - heres the rationale for building valuable products off of the facebook platform.
Slide's stated goal is be the pointcast of web 2.0 ie push content. The "slide shows" are what people pick up on however - its just a vehicle to a) understand the relationships between people you share content with b) register those preferences to push you new content.

They are NOT just a slideshow company - they now have a distribution network you can't match and the key to Consumer Internet success is in building your distribution and then leverage/monetise that later with services on top of that.

Slide is a legendary company going places. Don;t write them off.
I do work on rating algorithm and forecasting algorithm that I intend to implement as some sort of service or library. There will be website but just for advertising purposes.
yes. A middleware communication protocol and its infrastructure. It is a new communication tool with, of course, added value compared to existing solutions. new tools = better ways = new applications = new opportunities.

Protocol is named DITP (distributed information transfer protocol) and uses IDR (information data representation) as encoding rule (it's binary). The infrastructure is named DIS (distributed information system).

Some usable code will be out in a few weeks. The system is original in many ways and the curently forseen business model might be too. Coming out will be announced on Y Combinator news.
'... There is no money coming in on WordPress.com (http://www.wordpress.com) right now. We don't charge users or show advertisements ...'

wordpress.com isn't funded by fees ~ http://codex.wordpress.org/User:Matt/WordPress_Inc_Story

It's all self funded even the hardware. There seems to be lots of confusion about this. Not the least this article ~ http://www.airbagindustries.com/archives/008169.php

Wordpress does pass around the hat for donations but I don't think that would be classed as a good business model.
I hate plaigarism.

http://rondam.blogspot.com/2006/10/top-ten-geek-business-myths.html
nice one - i agree the plain white background look is a good mod for myspace
I agree, they do have concepts, but not in a human way. One questioner asked what their conceptual schema looks like, and the CEO said that it is basically the same as typical ontologies out there but with a few more links between concepts. We looked closely at OWL and RDF and CYC and all the other ontology languages we could find to see if it was possible to meaningfully capture human like conceptualization with these languages, and it isn't - they are extremely far from providing a framework for successfully doing it. A radically new framework is needed to make progress conceptually - which is what we are working on.
If you posted that on reddit you would be flamed to a crisp. But you're among friends here :D
Brett: I agree completely.

I visit this site for certain type of information/inspiration.

The last thing I want to see (especially at no. 1) is another dumbass screwup story, however funny it might be.

There are already plenty of sites for that kind of stuff (WTF, digg, boing boing, etc.).
Hey, check out this cartoon: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2007/05/14/cartoons_20070507?slide=3
Orbitz, the worst IPO of 2007?
Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX all look nice, but what I really want is better file upload
Here's one way to get funded: write this plugin
Yup. "I'm serious about this, and willing to pay quite a bit of money to make it happen."
LinkedIn to Attention Streams
Share Your Profiles + Contacts + Bookmarks
Rapid coding collaboration (Web based)
How Will Twitter Affect Search?
This is a great idea - I hope someone takes your offer and executes. We need this too.
XForms using javascript (No server side processing, no plugin needed!)
XForms: the next generation of HTML / XHTML forms and can stand alone
eBay, PayPal, YouSendIt, Dropsend, WuFoo, SHaadi.com, Stardoll.com
Xforms example: Submit Validation
You mean, funding for someone's own project? Or for the plugin?
Once you have the money, spending it is really up to you :)

I'm willing to pay someone to write this, but I'd also be a lot more likely to invest in a startup founded by that person (since they have proven that they can execute, assuming that the plugin works).
"What stops employees from organizing themselves?"

The companies themselves are one thing. I mentioned the practice called blacklisting above. If employees attempt to organize, the company fires the leaders and prevent them from being employed anywhere else in the industry. This, so far as I know, is currently very illegal because of the laws protecting Unions.

Once the workers are disorganized, they're at a big disadvantage. If we assume that individuals are unable to organize because employers use unethical tactics to keep them that way, knowledge and input on company policies becomes much harder to fight for.

Suppose top executives want to "cash out," and pursue a deal that is bad for the long term health and stability of the company but good for short term revenues and stock price. Normal workers are generally too busy with their jobs and families to spend time investigating that sort of thing. By the time the peons find out that a deal has been made, it's way too late to do anything. One of the things Unions theoretically do is ensure the workers have a voice. A Union leader would be involved somehow in the writing of the contract, and when they started talking about sending valuable training personel to a direct competitor he'd be able to fight it with the leverage of the entire Union.

But I am not a lawyer and not an expert on Union law, so I cannot give a complete example.
As PG said in "How to Create Wealth" the contributions of individual workers can not be measured individually. They have to be measured as a whole. That's why the negotiations often need to be done at the organizational level, rather than on an individual basis.

The problem there, of course, is that it becomes harder to hire and fire, thus it becomes harder to maximize the skill of your workforce. Which is why employers really need to think about the consequences of being evil.
The free market wage is the amount that an employer is voluntarily willing to pay, and an employee is voluntarily willing to be paid. To say that this is "inappropriate" is to argue for the introduction of force into one or the other side of this equation which would definitely be inappropriate.
How would/did you publicly launch a web based application?
What if the reason you're asking for this is to use it in a competing project? Would you mind sharing your motivation for paying a lot?
We're no longer in the old days - organizing is very easy today with all the technological tools available. Doing it in a way that prevents management from knowing who is leading the push is also quite doable. In fact, a group of employees could negotiate in unison by every one of them sending emails to management with the same content at the same time - making it impossible to single out anyone for firing. So again, I don't see your point.

The issue about executives destroying a company is an issue for the board of directors, who fire and hire the executives. If the board agrees to sell their company and the shareholders agree, etc, that is their prerogative as they own the company, not management or the employees. Unions are powerless in this context, which is a good thing.

But I guess the reality is that unions in the US are shrinking fast as they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
How a blog spammer got past Akismet's filters
I agree. For games people pay to solve made-up problems that are only just challenging enough to be fun.

Games like Zelda and MMOs start simple in order to ease you into the game. Yes, part of the fun is the carrot-on-a-stick, but the importance of the whole dynamic is that you're only given as much as you can handle at one time. Gradually, as you get accustomed to how the game works, complexity is increased.

For productivity software, it might be useful to create a tutorial in the form of a game.
I've worked on one that's distributed and partially web-based (large parallel-programming cluster with 3 different web clients and two desktop clients).

The difference is that in a webapp, you have to think of the implications of distribution on every user request. So you have to consider latency and status feedback for everything the user does, you can't use shared state, you have to keep in-memory data structures to a minimum, you can't count on getting notification when events occur, and so on. Desktop-based apps with a distributed back-end usually have a well-defined interface to the cluster. As long as you don't need to update the backend, you can keep anything you want in memory. And you usually have a two-way connection: you don't need to frame everything in terms of request/responses.
LinkedIn Answers: Can you recommend an Angel Investor?
I'm surprised the ad doesnt also contain a QR code of some kind.

It's interesting to see the phone number url. A trade off between memorability and ease of entry. Looks similar to the approach I'm taking with Mobile Open ID where instead of user/email/password I have phone number and pin code.
Between tracking via Urchin and invites via GMail, perhaps linked to search traffic, there's a really good chance Google knows more about your customers than you do.
Wouldn't it be better to fix the browser itself, ie contribute to FireFox? Or is there a chance to get Mozilla to bundle the plugin by default?

What does it take to make a plugin universally available? So far only Flash seems to have succeeded? It's not only the users at home that might lack the technical skill, it is also the poor minions at the big corporations that depend on their admins goodwill...
It'll take time but eventually (5-10years) they'll stop getting in our way. For now I can keep dreaming..
I guess Paul wants it to be cross browser compatible so he's not tying it to any browser implementation (i.e. firefox). But if he succeeds, browser vendors will surely incoorperate this functionality into their browsers.
I think you're way off the mark. Advertising a keyword instead of a url is a much more effective way of directing users to a specific page on a website. AOL knew this, and when they were the dominant service provider tons of companies would direct you to their site through an AOL keyword. Today I still hear a lot of radio commercials encouraging listeners to get involved in contests by going to their websites and entering a keyword.
I'm wondering which technology/platform is the best to implement this in? Maybe Flex? I know it definately needs a javascript interface.
The Reddit comment thread ( http://reddit.com/info/1p9da/comments ) actually has some useful information in it.
Yes, but if this is an an important news item, what he said would probably be mentioned on many web pages in many forms, including a form that matches your query.
Interesting. I asked the same question a month ago and got zero replies. Maybe my network just sucks.
I don't think that was the one I had seen, but it might be a similar concept. Thanks!
Of course universal browser support would be key. That poses the next question: what is the chance to get Microsoft to bundle an Open Source plugin with their browser?
Out of Chaos, Order. Or So Google Says.
Seems like Google is beginning to do what they said they wouldn't in their statement at their IPO, which is bend to the short-term demands of shareholders.
I disagree, I have different set of axioms than you. My axioms are based on morality and well-being. What are you axioms based on ?
You may be right, but either way anti-union sentiment isn't particularly useful. It's not a good idea to recklessly jettison union protections without understanding what they're really doing in the first place.

You say organizing is easy with the internet, but sites like overhear.us only just launched, and we really have no data about how effective they will be. Secret organization is not effective either, because in order to actually negotiate anything serious they would have to come out, at which point they'd be vulnerable.

And my example is about arriving at the best possible economic solution for everyone, not simply assuming that the way company ownership works is perfect and therefore any consequences of that are Good Things. My example is about making sure the workers can excercise their economic power. I am most definitely not saying that a Union should be able to prevent a Board from selling the company, nor even entering into a bad deal. I'm saying that a company should not be allowed to use threats of force to influence the labor market (eg keep it disorganized by blacklisting leaders).
I have some experience with writing in Lisp without good libraries for what I'm doing. It turns out not to be an enormous amount of work to turn an unmaintained unusable FFI to the C library you want into a highly usable, Lispish library. It can at times even be useful for understanding said library. I'm not saying this isn't a drawback of Lisp, but it's also not as huge a barrier as some might think. FFI's have gotten good enough that it doesn't really matter that much what language the library is written in.
Microsoft will be liable to just re-implement it in their browser.
I've been really impressed with flex charting and if the 300 bucks isn't too much for ya, I would recommend it. Google finance is a good example of it's power and integration ability with javascript.
Psychic Whois - Instant Ajax, Context-Based Domain Name Suggestions and Lookup
Steve Jobs Answers Questions at Shareholder Meeting
This is like instantdomaingenerator.com , except Psychic Whois also suggests possible alternatives according to the context, as you type!
It's a mistake. Flash has ~99% penetration. This new plugin would have ~0%. That's makes it absolutely useless. Paul is far better off sponsoring this as a Firefox improvement (which would be copied by Safari and IE eventually). Even lobbying Adobe to put this in the next Flash release is a better idea. Creating a brand new plugin is a big mistake.
Re: Applets don't work.

Let's all try this: http://www.jupload.biz/demo/0.90/index-demo.html

Tell me if it doesn't work.
I've just returned from the gym with such a system installed :) Well, not exactly. I have to enter my five-digit number at each machine, so that it knew who is exercising but apart from that it does almost everything you described.
http://www.fitlinxx.com/brand.htm
I'm in Japan and I notice URLs all over the place. Sure there's _way_ more mobile use here, but there's also a flood of .jp's too. That said, it's always good to keep in mind that millions of people get to google.com by typing "Google" in Google.
The other significant benefit is that the key word is written in japanese where URL are restricted to ASCII. Occidental people don't understand this huge problem. Arabs and russian people are facing it too. Imagine a web page in english for english people and you have to write an url in asian or arabe script to reach it! Would you be able to remember such url when seen in an advertisement ? The most surprising is that they didn't solved this problem yet. This situation won't last. Yes urls are death ... in the sense PG gave to this concept.

The distributed information system (DIS) I am currently working on is planned to solve this.
"Google was based on a couple of brilliant ideas (Page rank, text-only ads, massive parallel implementation on cheap hardware) but none of those ideas were original with Larry or Sergey."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

"PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank[1]) and Sergey Brin "

Geez, it's only named after him. Also: text-only ads are somewhat less brilliant than any number of things msft has done. Yeah--they _work_, but they aren't brilliant, and they sure as hell aren't original. Massive parallel implementation, of course, is hardly an "idea" of google's.
Yes, me: http://server.imgseek.net/

Looking for ways to license visual search technology.
Hey, You Startup Monkeys: Will Quickbooks Be Enough?
Those of you living The Dream and running a startup and having to do the books: what are you using? Is it enough to just use Quickbooks, or do you have to hire an accountant?

Help out those of us still in the planning stages/stealth mode.
A commonly misspelled word can't automatically become "correct", because there is always some etymology behind a word and it doesn't allow you to mess with it. "Ridiculous" is of Latin origins, for example.
Wow that is amazing. I've never seen anything like this. He even had people giving him their telephone numbers.
How do you cope with many users having the Display Name "pg"? How can a reader easily tell which pg it is?
The Art of Chart - Bringing Wall Street Ideas to the Masses
I've been using QB for years. The largest business I know about that uses it is a client of mine, a futures fund LLC managing over 2.5 billion dollars (They use it to manage their business accounts, not the client's money for which they have vast amounts of proprietary software).
How would creating such a plugin demonstrate important abilities that you would look for in founders? Many people have technical competence and many startup prototypes get rewritten after acquisition.
See also:

http://www.startupping.com/forums/showthread.php?t=455
Y Combinator News LinkedIn Group
Hi All,
With all the questions around about finding VC etc, I thought it would be a good idea to start a LinkedIn group to network through there as well.

Groups on LinkedIn are only updated to the site every 4-6 weeks, but if you would like simply email me @ YCLinkedin@gmail.com and I will invite you to the group as soon as it is up and running.

Thanks,
~E
Do both: use QB to keep the books, and have an account check it over quarterly (monthly, yearly, whatever works best for you) to make sure you're not doing anything that will really cost you down the road.

That's what my start-up did.

btw, I would recommend that you don't buy the premier edition: go for the online version. All the bells and whistles can be done by you with other programs, even excel.
You've got to use some kind of program to keep track of number. And it's cheapest to do the books yourself or hire someone to do it part time. Another nice thing about the online edition is it's easier to share your information with your accountant.
Thanks for the information, very useful.
YC.News Lesson: Lose over 50 Karma points in a matter of minutes!
I'm also using Quickbooks. It's pretty easy to learn - even if you don't have an accounting background. When I got started I had my tax CPA look over my books to make sure I was doing things right.

Also, you should check out http://oe.quickbooks.com/ - it's an online version of the software, which I've been pretty happy with. Subscription is $20 a month (vs. $150-$400 for the install). It's great for startups that aren't sure how long they're going to be around...
Possible Solution:

Make people lose karma when they click the down arrow.
Has been greatly exaggerated.
Bail on One Idea Today
Very true. Gmail misses misspellings all the time. Often I have to fire up emacs to double check.
TechCrunch20 Conference: Caterina Fake, MC Hammer & Rajeev Motwani Join Expert Panel
Good catch, hopefully pg will change the URL when he reads this.
MC Hammer?
What happened is that someone was offended by one of your comments and they go around and make sure that you loose points. the worst thing is that some of them will follow you for a couple of days and keep doing this. The best solution is to simply write a script that counts how many time we voted down the same user's comments and do a ratio.
The Secret Weapon of Small Business Success
I'm making replica '57 Chevy's
http://www.fresemotorcars.com/