skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wireless: India's Hot, China's Not
The Battle for Mobile Search
8.3% of what they did in 2005: wow.
1. Have it so you can be automatically logged in. I have to manually log in every time I visit the site (using Safari here).

2. Just like Reddit does, show the domain each link belongs to. Reddit has this in brackets after the headline, which works fine. Since I don't have much free time, there are some sites that have sub-par content which I avoid reading, and it helps to know where I would end up without having to hover over the link.
CRV Quickstart:   $250,000 in seed stage financing. How does an 18 year old entrepreneur find references to list on the application?
It's bad if you come out of the Techstars program without any funding and a non-sustainable company, but then you're probably screwed anyways. VCs are infamously inscrutable; we hear that they are always out to take advantage of naive or underfunded companies.

If you're good enough to get further investment after Techstars, you get it from a VC that you already know instead of having to deal with the typical painful negotiations. And if Brad Feld's Foundry Group will give you money, maybe you could get Bay Area VC money. Even better, the best companies will get to reinvest their own profits.
What algorithm does news.YC use to filter spam?
Great Way To Find New Job And Career
Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars, which afterwards collapsed because after moving the servers outside China the service's data were going through word filtering (e.g. during login) and there were failures...
Ebay bought its Chinese clone for hundreds of millions of dollars
Probably they dislike the content and not the posting itself.
You know your country doesn't have many role models when Alex Tew is considered the poster child for a successful Internet entrepreneur.
Bug: I think there is a bug when you edit one of your comments. Instead updating seems there is a new entry?
That is actually what a guy I know from Wilson Sonsini says: Sell the product, design the product, build the product.

I think it is the best strategy provided that A) you are targeting businesses B) your software fills a need of a very specific niche.

Regardless of whether you literally sell the product first though, I think it's good to at least think about the process in that order.
Inside Myspace.com - (great info on how they scaled)
Any thoughts on collaborative invention (e.g., using human-based genetic algorithms)?
Just to take one example, one might build a service where users invent board games. This could be done using human-based genetic algorithms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-based_genetic_algorithm. Users of the service would be able to modify rules to try to make a game more fun. A fitness function would take into account how popular various game variants are among players. Note that users of such a service need not be programmers: the domain is sufficiently restricted so as to make visual point-and-click rule creation/modification possible.
You should be able to vote down bad stories. I thought this wouldn't be needed but we're starting to get off-topic submissions, so we need to be able to bury them.
This was a great read and the patterns of growth and strategies they used hold true even for much less extreme scaling.
Y Combinator funded companies
xobni.com, reddit.com, pollground.com, loopt.com, weebly.com

which else?
Use your customers as references. If you don't have customers, use the people who said they'd probably buy your product if it existed.

Also, you aren't going to get 250k without at the very least a bunch of informal advisors, so list those people too.
Trusted human editors.
Just another reminder that acquisition cannot be your only exit strategy.
Is it acceptable for software to lie (like in the ESP Game say)?
One might imagine having a service lie to, for example, make it look more busy (so as to attract more users) and/or to detect cheating. Is this a reasonable thing to do? See for example how the ESP game lies: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/ESP.pdf. In particular, take a look at the sections on Pre-Recorded Game Play and Cheating.
If you think that it would be morally wrong to lie in this way, would it be better if the service told you that it may lie at times to enhance the user experience?
Myspace preparing to block all widgets?
&#34;Remember Me&#34; Feature Would Be Nice
As another example, consider using human-based genetic algorithms to create daily news shows, perhaps in the style of this site (but using people rather than computers): http://www.newsatseven.com
This seems like a great time-waster idea. It would probably be very addictive if it ever got critical mass. Naturally I think it will be impossible to monetize on its own, but it will be awesome when a profitable company buys them out.
Yahoo! Announces Hosting of YUI libraries on their edge network
50 percent of their traffic is for their mail service at this point, according to Alexa. If they ever get beaten on that, it'll be lights out for them.
Am debugging it now.
More that you can't count on any given acquirer.
True, but does that imply that companies should be formed with the sole purpose/goal of getting acquired?
"Attachment creates delusion."

-- Buddhist saying
Make Money From Making Comments!
A quick place to list your startup and see others
Freedom of choice, and how entrepreneurs relate to it
Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them
Tim Bray: &#34;The buzz around OpenID is becoming impossible to ignore.&#34;
Can you change the CSS so that the links that have already been visited turn a different color?
a YC company
option to open articles/comments in a new tab by default?

bookmarklet set (I often use my "reddit this" bookmarklet to get back to the comments page for an article I've clicked)
I'm not much of an expert on this stuff... what do you all think about their chances?
I've been trying out their beta for the last couple weeks, and while some may find it nice, it doesn't hook me at all.
It shouldn't be a problem as long as they have a business model this time around. :)

Good article, thanks.
Couldn't they just put Adsense on the sidebar to monetise it?
Of course it'd be ideal to create a company with a sustaining business model; there's no question about that.

Is that the only time a company should be formed? That may be akin to only purchasing shares in long-term growth companies. Sometimes it's in your best interest to just ride the short-term explosion and move on.

It's completely viable to get into something with only a foreseeable immediate market. After a certain point, perhaps the company would be better off taking advantage of the economies of scale. It isn't a problem to be true to yourself and realize early on that an acquisition is the best end-target for your new company.
I can see this resulting in mass abuse very soon.
Humans have too much compassion. We need cold, hard algorithms! Indiscriminating, zero-tolerant machines! ;)
A lot of you would-be entrepreneurs should give this a read. There are many things to consider in the crucial first steps.
Thanks, I'll be watching this soon.
Interesting that two of these companies had NO co-founder. Hmmm... There seems to be a lot of emphasis in the YC companies on finding a co-founder, a partner, etc.
All I know is that it works. I tried out a few terms and got what I had in mind every time.

They heavily emphasize speech recognition, I think. For what this is, it's very cool. The technology is there and the product works. I think this is going places.
I did a search and didn't see this mentioned.

In any case, a very useful feature would be a way to track your comments in the different submissions and the stories that you voted up.

There are a lot of really great stories on here and sometimes I don't have the time to finish reading some. I'd like to be able to find the stories again quickly in my recent history.
I pointed out in an earlier article (http://m4th.com/Articles/Article.php?Article-Title=Anatomy-of-a-Successful-Social-Network) that MySpace owes much of its success to the countless choices it offers to its users. Over the past couple of months, however, MySpace has turned greedy. Rupert Murdoch feels that online widgets are a zero-sum game; in other words, widget companies make profit at the expense of MySpace. This couldn't be further from the truth; the fact is that widgets complement MySpace by giving its users the choice to decorate their pages anyway they want. By restricting access to these widgets, MySpace will not only frustrate the users but also generate unprecedented negative publicity. - Jawad Shuaib
People trying to delete their posts. Erasing the text == deleting the post.
Silicon Valley has become Media Valley - someone should tell NYC
myspace arn't given enough credit, supporting a site with that many users is no easy task.
Patience pays for VCs too. It was my understanding that many quick sell outs were a result of VC pressure. MySpace former ceo, for example, filed a lawsuit against its investors (VantagePoint) for pressuring them into sell out for a quick $580 million. VCs are much like shareholders in corporations; they often vote for a buyout or merger if a corporate raider, like Carl Icahn, promises quick short term dividents. The way I see it, a founder is more likely to stick to their company than an investor whose only interest is cash.
So i'm not the only young one pursuing a startup. Good to know.

Good luck.
It was bound to happen. All the known ones will probably have to pay some sort of a toll. I wonder if the community will care enough to fight back?
Nice. A network of hierarchical bayes inference machines without a line of code.
I've been thinking about this in relation to my startup-- it would be great to have a really low-friction way for my users to create accounts, and to say, "well, if you already have an AIM account or a LiveJournal account, just use those credentials".

But I think the average user might need some education on this, as they might suspect that my site is just a phishing scheme? I.e. why would I be asking for their password to another site?

I wonder if I could autodiscover existing openID credentials/other accounts as part of my signup process? Kind of how 30boxes can autodiscover myspace accounts based on an email address... I'm trying to envision what that user experience could be like.

Ideas, anyone?
downvotes on articles might help... There are a bunch of posts from an adsense farm that I'd like to flag/downvote.
How to handle security bugs in your code
This problem is firefox specific. For whatever reason, IE does The Right Thing. Actually, the whole site just looks better in IE, so maybe this should be a request for better Firefox support :)
Theres a list at:

http://yrumors.infogami.com/OldHomePage
Would love to see the "inbox" feature of reddit, so I can see when one of my comments has been replied to.

Or simply an email or RSS notification... you wanted to spark the discussion, right? So give me a way of knowing if I've sparked anything!

Also, it'd be nice to see on the list pages something along the lines of "N comments (most recent M |minutes|hours|days ago)"
Startup School Wiki - Wiki inc videos of startup school 2006 and 2005
Facebook is Stickier than Peanut Butter
Ok, from now on, restarting the server shouldn't log anyone out. Form submissions will still be lost if a restart happens in the middle, though.
Make sure and post this comment in the "Features you want" section if you haven't already. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=363
In my experience the acquiring company will require an NDA since as a public company they would not want early acquisition discussions disclosed. I've only done one such transaction but I understand this requirement is typical.

The company to be acquired also wants to have an NDA in this case since in the event that the acquisition does not proceed you don't want your negotiating position revealed to other potential acquirers before you have chance to even negotiate with them.
Slife: displays graphically what you do with your computer
really? which ones?
How to Waste a Lot of Money in Software Development
It doesn't even really have to be AJAX. You could solve the problem just by setting up an #anchor so that when the screen reloads after voting, it just the user back to where they left off.
Maybe the rules could even be tweaked to keep good stories with a minority viewpoint from being buried. At the very least, maybe have down votes count as only 1/2 a vote. (So there would have to be greater than 2:1 of people against a story to bring it down below 0 points)
Thanks for the solid advice.
can't speak for joshwa, but I thought this one was spammy. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1040
From an engineering perspective, I enjoyed the inside look at how Myspace scaled their infrastructure. Scaling is certainly a critical issue for these big sites; one of the reasons that Friendster waned in popularity was that they used algorithms and a back-end infrastructure that were painfully slow for their once-massive user base.

On the other hand, a site should be able to handle several hundred thousand users with a single beefy database server, remote static file hosting, and a few load-balance webservers. When you start 'scaling out' to a bigger array of cheap hardware, you introduce complications that make your site harder to maintain and improve. That change will need to happen at some point along the growth curve, but it seems to me that seed stage entrepreneurs need to be most concerned about making a product that people want to use.
I can't get it to pull up.
google cache
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:Kzhj8Oi5868J:www.slifelabs.com/&strip=1

Good heavens, there's not a news.YC effect, is there? I guess it's on digg...
How to Waste a Lot of Money in Software Development: _Neglect to fire_ people who need to be fired and/or neglect to have a little bit of new blood flowing into the program- especially if it's a long-lived program. If there is a programmer not pulling their weight or not passionate about the project or programming in general- move them or help them find another job. Otherwise they'll be a drag on everyone. Don't let the accountant decide whom to fire. The team knows.

Anyone who has seen a government IT department (except for NASA) knows what I'm talking about.
boso.com (now auctomatic), socialmoth, justin.tv?
Facebook Launches Facebook Query Language
Many NDAs require the disclosing party to describe, list, or specify the confidential items disclosed. But often I find when very early stage inventors ask people to sign NDAs they often fail to specify what is disclosed even though their agreements require it. If you ever have to enforce an NDA, trying to argue that the entire conversation was confidential is much harder than simply producing the list of disclosures.
Also, I've never asked an investor to sign an NDA. Asking someone to sign an NDA indicates a lack of trust. IMO if you don't trust the people you are talking to you probably shouldn't be talking to them at all.

Recently I've been asked to sign NDAs as part of employment interviews. This seems to have almost become standard practice now. I don't really think this is a great idea, and I often won't take an interview that requires an NDA. But sometimes if I am certain that I won't be developing my own ideas in the field I'll sign one. Inevitably I find that these employment related NDAs are the most frivolous, silly, and irrelevant ones I sign. YMMV.
http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=fql <- thats the facebook docs on it.

Maybe a bit bland but I was thinking of using the facebook api so i found it interesting. Also I was thinking how the facebook api is a genius move by facebook. The friends network is a barrier to entry for any new vertically integrated social network, so if you can effectively use the friends network established in facebook it gives you a lot of power. Wider adoption of the api would strengthen facebooks position as well. They probably need to make the api more powerful, which they might not be willing to do.
$8 billion for 18 million users values each user at $440. Assuming that the technology can be reasonably coppied in less than $100k, apart from users what else does facebook have? They also have a very powerful brand. Given that myspace went for $440m (correct?) then the facebook valuation probably is reasonably fair.

Anyone suggested just paying 20 million users $100 each to join and use your social network for 1 month, hehehe, seems like you could 4 times as much money :-)
A Fatal Paper Cut - Too many shareholders and bad shareholders agreement
Story is not that interesting but the advice is.
Hmm, the second Top 10 list about running a forum from seorefugee.com. Something tells me their real strength lies in Google rankings, not forums.
This has been attempted a few times before without a whole lot of success. There was one plugin launched fairly recently that added a sidebar user-contributed Wiki to every site. And there was another before that where you could add virtual "graffiti" to sites. It's a neat idea, but I think it'll be pretty difficult to generate a critical mass (before it gets overtaken by spam and trolls)
It would be stupid for myspace to do it, they would piss off a lot of there most active users. Kind off makes sense for things like revver where myspace give there own competitive offering. Who knows they might do something stupid and give an advantage to other social networks.
Anyone know what he means by the "No threading etc." comment in: 'It's a tool. The community can grow elsewhere. No threading etc. "del.icio.us
sux" is an awful experience I'd rather user's didn't have.'
Good point. I think (well, actually, I *know*) that their are companies out there who have been waiting--specifically--for Yahoo to acquire them. Just look at all those Dodgeball clones or Writely clones out there with no real business model.
After you edit a comment, it's very difficult to figure out how to get back to the discussion. This is a problem with posting a comment or performing other actions too, but it's particularly annoying when you edit a comment.
This is a real problem. When a partner from WSGR came to speak at YC, I asked her what was the single worst mistake made by inexperienced founders, and she said it was being sloppy with stock.
Software Exploited by Pirates Goes to Work for Hollywood
erm, the technology cannot be copied for less than $100k.
>Joi Ito, founder of Neoteny, a venture firm, and former chair of Infoseek Japan, has joined a group of technologists advising Dean ... I contact him to ask if he tihnks there's a difference between an emergent leader and an old-fashioned political opportunist. What does it take to lead a smart mob? Ito e-mails back an odd metaphor: "You're not a leader, you're a place. You're like a park or a garden. If it's comfortable and cool, people are attracted. Deanspace is not really about Dean. It's about us."

Facebook is a place. Think of it like Manhattan. What creates value isn't the population (the users). Nor is it the buildings (the technology). What creates value is the emergent social interactions and the culture that occur there. To put it in geek terms, it's not the instances of people, but rather what goes on in the interstices between them.

To quote Howard Rheingold, "The 'killer app' of tomorrow won't be software or hardware devices, but the social practices they make possible. The most far-reaching changes will come from the kinds of relationships, enterprises, communities, and markets that this future infrastructure will make possible."
Six Things to do with OpenID
Definitely. I have seen at least couple other firefox extensions to do the same thing (here's one: http://www.yakalike.com/). I was involved in a drawing/graffiti type one last year (http://drawhere.com). It was fun to try and get done in javascript, but it was hard to hold people's interest for an extended period. There's a history of this stuff failing: http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,42803-2,00.html

I'll be curious to see if/how someone gets it to stick.
here's another one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon.php?id=1825
I'd say I'm a little skeptical.

The first question I'd have is how fast they can parse video. The second is how much it costs to do it.

It seems you would have to be able to do recognition much faster than real-time for a realistic web video search capability (see for example http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=599600) and you would certainly need a lot of hardware to do this at scale for millions of video clips.

See also: http://www.newmediamusings.com/blog/2005/09/blinkx_a_citize.html
I heard a rumour that each instance is 6MB of source code, alone!
Threadless founders seminar
Cool idea, but I don't think the terms and conditions would allow it. You're not allowed to embed them directly into an application. A HTML page that the application displays that is accessible from any browser should be OK, but you'd lose the 'sense' part. Maybe ads for the most popular sites, with specially created HTML pages with hidden text (if Google overlooks that, which I doubt) that guides the adsense, would work.

It has been a while since I looked at it - I was pondering building a consumer app supported by adsense but decided it was probably too much trouble.
I'm glad you linked to the talk. It's excellent.

I'm curious, why do you think that visual games are more likely to be successful? His question answering games seemed useful and engaging, too.

There must be great startup ideas lurking behind this idea of games and Human Computation. (Luis alludes to as much, with his tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the ESP game double as a dating service.)
How OkCupid prevents break-ins despite buggy code
Critical mass for something like this is a nasty problem, but I think it could be cracked. Firefox is a bit of a selective user base to begin with (the +/- 10% userbase are probably very heavily weighted towards the tech savvy), and if you could get critical mass for one site that has a large Firefox user base on which the chat would be very helpful (say, Wikipedia) spreading out from there could be just a matter of time if you play your cards right.

Also, I haven't tried it, but I do hope there's an option to easily disable it because, after all, _I_ am only looking at the realnursestakeiteverywhere.com for educational purposes, but I definitely don't want to talk with those _other_ losers there.
IANAL either (although I do date one), and I too have heard of these things. I think they are called E-2 visas. They require you to raise or invest around $100k in a US business. The lawyer who told me about the E-2 was quick to warn that the applications get scrutinized hard. It sounded political, vaguely sketchy, expensive, and complicated.
Would an implicit +2 for every unique user that posts a comment in the thread be a good idea? Or maybe number of characters in comments / 10, where only those comments posted by people with Karma of >10 are counted? Or maybe there should be a longetivity modifier, where a topic that was heavily voted up and discussed at length should stay for, say, twice as long as a topic that was just voted heavily up?

Or there could be a 'Top Discussions' side by side with 'Top' so there's a different filter for people looking for news (which you want to be recent and not obscured by long running threads) and people looking for discussions (which I'd argue will be more valuable if the popular ones are kept around for a while).

Open for abuse, most definitely, but if the purpose of this site is to build community, I think those topics that get discussed should be more easily accessed. Ideally people would appreciate some valuable discussion and upvote the thread, but this thread here is a perfect example of one that should probably stick around for a while, but has nearly 3x as many comments as upvotes.

Just throwing ideas out - tell me if I'm crazy.
Too many companies are like bad marriages
They're all not launched and/or making something new.
Web 2.0 Report