skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now that MySpace is owned by MegaCorp, it feels like it has assumed the role of 'cash cow' in their product matrix. Not much innovation has come out of MS in awhile (some would argue ever). I may be a disaffected Gen-Y'er, but cmon now, it's fairly boring! Rupert will just squeeze it until every drop is coaxed out, and the only active users out of 20 Billion (or thereabouts) are Ronald McDonald and Cher.
Large groups of people aren't good at entrepreneurship. That doesn't mean a large corporation can't give a small group of people autonomy to go off and do their own thing. You don't get all of the benefits of being a startup, but you still get some of them.

But yeah, this is definitely going to fail.
What's Songkick all about? The title sounds cool.
lol, I can picture it as well... it brings to mind that memorable quote from the movie Contact:

"What's the first rule of government spending...? Why buy only one when you can have two for twice the cost?"

This entire venture feels like the startup equivalent of Gigli: it seemed ridiculous before it was released, and even more ridiculous afterwards.
Wow, "dropbox" takes on a whole new meaning when you refer to them as "dropboxers"...
Not for the rest of us... :)
Do you have an aesthetic sense for women/men as appropriate?
My best tip for public speaking: speak loudly. Don't scream, but it makes you stand out and seem incredibly confident if you're just speaking louder (more loudly?) than everyone else. This, of course, takes a certain amount of confidence to do.
Just finished listening... this clip is worth the time, a lot of good stuff in here. I just wish they touched more on how the Google acquisition unfolded, rather than the "we met some people, yadda yadda" approach. But I'm guessing they're not at liberty to discuss all the details :)
"I want to know if something like MySQL/Postgres/SQlite is up to the task?"

You haven't defined the task, other than to say it is a web application.

At least one of those databases is up to the task, if the task is, in fact, an application that requires a database. Some of the largest sites in the world use one, two, or all three of those databases in one way or another. The best designed of them probably use them appropriately, and thus may have a use for both SQLite and one of MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Since no one else seems to be doing so, let me put in a plug for MSSQL. If you're using the Microsoft stack, it ought to be the default choice. The integration with the rest of the environment (LINQ, db process LCR, Visual Studio integration, async transactional queuing, one heck of a molap engine, a great etl tool and more) is just too good to give up. And it's a darned nice database to boot, with 2008 on the way being even nicer. Also, Microsoft has publicly assured customers they will continue to license per socket, not per core. While still more expensive than the free db's (duh), at least you're not stuck handing over all future Moore's law gains to Larry Ellison.
Any ideas why our site's getting 404s to the /undefined URL?
It's really strange: we're getting occasional 404 page-not-founds at the URL /undefined on our site (micropledge.com). HTTP_REFERER is set, usually to our home page, so it's not some random guy typing into his address bar. We saw who it was once when it happened, so we contacted him, but he said he didn't see anything wrong in his browser -- so it's something behind-the-scenes.

Haven't been able to reproduce it here, or find any answers on the web. Doesn't seem to be a specific browser. My hunch is that it's some JavaScript quirk, or possibly the Google Analytics JS code, but I'm not sure...
Microsoft is a large corporation..Go ask Netscape , Wordperfect ,Lotus 1-2-3 etc whether Microsoft is entrepreneural or not.
Beware of Web 2.0 Crossing the Chasm A
Working in a Start-up [Wikia]
"great scientist" : http://www.spock.com/q/great-scientist

You probably wanted these results....
I think your javascript hunch sounds right. I see a few similar 404s in my logs on the 8th and the 9th. So, maybe it is Google Analytics?
Depends - if you just need data storage that's fast, and don't care about having 100% data integrity, Mysql seems popular. I wouldn't trust people's money to it, though.

I've long preferred PostgreSQL, because it's always had those things that make a relationanl DB a relational DB - foreign keys, lots of consistency checks, things like that. I have to admit, though, that as of Mysql 5, with InnoDB, it has started to resemble a "real database".

Of course, for some applications, data integrity really doesn't matter that much, and you'd prefer speed, so Mysql with its native db type might be faster.
I don't think it works like that. Try "scientist physics" and you get some meaningful results.

http://www.spock.com/q/scientist-physics
Why did you sell?
Well played - I guess I picked the wrong vocabulary :P
Yeah, if anything, the fact that the Gmail free quota is still stuck at 2.8GB shows that they're getting complacent and making bad product decisions.
It is way cool...you can checkout our page by adding a /xackup
The Best Social Networks for Business
A bizarre financial fact about Pittsburgh: it's one of the best places in America to be a slumlord. It is cheaper to own a house than to rent. Last year, I rented a dilapidated 3 bedroom townhouse for $750/monthly. Buying a renovated copy of the same townhouse would cost $550 monthly with no down payment and $450 monthly with 20% down.
Pepsi sells sugared water. Nike sells shoes.

Merrill Lynch takes money and turns it into more money and is rather well known for doing so. It makes sense to me that there is more money in the financial business than in the shoe business.
I always used YouTube with Flash 7. There was a big gap between 7 and 9 for Linux with no 8.
The database is only one of a list of important architectural choices. Are you going to use a *nix (Linux, BSD, Solaris...) or Windows? What programming languages? Perl, Python, Java, Visual Basic... Applesoft Basic? Are you going to use a framework or code everything from scratch?

These answers are all important, but it is possible to do a good job or a bad job with any of those languages. Ultimately the choice of platform, languages, database, etc. are not as important as how you put the pieces together.

You might also what other successful sites are using, particularly those with data structures similar to what you are planning. I believe Facebook and Wikipedia both use PHP and MySQL. FlightAware (which does a really super job with lots of real-time data) uses Postgres.

While it is, I'm sure, possible to design a very effective site with almost any combination but Windows/.Net/MSSQL seems like a particularly poor choice. There are only a few big data-driven sites using that technology and most of them aren't technically very good. Myspace is one example - (I think they use MSSQL) - but they have horrible response times and frequent hiccups. Ancestry.com is another big .Net site but they have a lot of problems. Pages frequently hang while loading, response not quick at all and their UI is very awkward. Several of the big airline sites run .Net but they aren't very good either. Big companies whose primary business isn't IT seem to go with .Net a lot and it shows in the quality of their sites - but that's not so bad - it creates a lot of opportunities for people like us. While I'm sure it is POSSIBLE to do good work on the Microsoft platform it seems very, very unlikely.

My personal choice after having worked, at one time or another, with all of the options discussed here is very clearly LAMP - Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl|PHP|Python but I wouldn't object to substituting BSD, Lighttpd or Postgres.

As someone around here said recently, "...anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't."
In Javascript "http://site.example/"+undefined produces "http://site.example/undefined".
I would recommend PostGreSQL and you probably won't need to switch to Oracle if you use PostGres properly. Importantly its free and has a usable and friendlier license than MySQL.

I am working on a startup idea which will also have high traffic and I am personally using Schevo - which is a non-sql Object DBMS for python based on Durus. I like Schevo because SQL sucks and using Schevo is like you a programming language - in this case its Python. You can check out the Schevo project at www.schevo.org. This would work for you only if you are using Python (highly recommend). Schevo does not have very good documentation yet, but it has excellent support on the IRC and Google Groups from its creators - at least I have found them to give complete and quick responses.Hope this helps.
Easiest way to create cool logos
It works with GIMP in the background. Many of the logo designs are intriguing enough. Definitely worth a try ..
This is where NBC and Fox's content is going to be available online, so this company with no name will not be going away, unless it collapses before the launch. In the long term, the advertising revenues from NBC and Fox's online video should be very respectable.

As long as the shows are free to watch, it won't be a disastrous failure because there aren't many places to easily and legally watch online network TV. The best way to compete with piracy is to give your media away. If they insist on charging for everything, it'll fail.
You mean the $30 CPM banner ads?
PostgresQL. It scales very well in my opinion, although I have yet to get to Face Book sized numbers :-)

I second all the 'has real features and is more reliable' comments that precede this one; I add to those my number one favourite. I can develop on Win32 and deploy on Linux and apply backups, schema changes, what have you from one to the other without any pain at all.
I started with MySQL but simply could not achieve the above.
YMMV naturally.
don't you work for oracle??

http://www.blogger.com/profile/01908257636257717349
Startups for the rest of us
Hah. Good catch. I guess it explains why he thinks "Sometimes you gotta spend money to make money..." makes sense with web app databases. A more honest way of putting that would be "Sometimes you gotta spend money for me to make money charging you to support black box bloatware..."

Astroturfed.
One viable option is: none. Desktop apps don't automatically have to include a database. Why should web apps?
..after the heart attack inducing story about GDrive, I'm now close to having another one in laughter from this posting...
We spend the week before working mainly on that.
... in 1996.
That is weird. From that angle, with the skylights
covered, the place does look like a basement. It
looks better in the image that used to be
on our front page:

http://ycombinator.com/images/ycoffice2776-400.jpg
drew, as a beta user, I would say that until google buys dropbox and offers it as a download, (or makes something similar to the seamless updates that dropbox offers) I wouldn't worry :~).
Ask pg:How about weekly tarballs of news.yc? We'll learn from how u develop
It would be great to see how Paul Graham evolves software, esp. in Lisp and all - things like handling changing requirements and making the most of Lisp/Arc. Any takers? Just a snapshot of the source...
Microsoft Touts Imaging Technology
Why A VC May Be Slow To Respond To Your Executive Summary
After submitting your executive summary you may not receive a response for several weeks. While this can be frustrating, do not let it discourage you...
Hand over those gains to Steve Ballmer instead?

I use .net and mssql at work and will admit that the tooling around ms products is superb. However, I really don't know what we pay to deploy on it. A lot more than a mysql deployment I am sure.
BitTorrent Addresses Closed Source Issues
Windows Live SkyDrive
If you're doing a start up then the whole point is to launch fast. Why would you want to choose a technology that could get in the way with licensing costs and complicated bloat?

Pick something that is free and good.
Well Said...
<blink>WizbangCo</blink>
1. Facebook is decent but a lot of my real-life friends already use MySpace. I refuse to keep up with 2+ social networking sites, its a waste of time!

If I could push/pull content thru one site, I'd be more likely to use social networking sites more.

2. Internet TV = http://tvlinks.co.uk if the DVR missed a show or I discover a new series mid-season. I like amateur stuff like YouTube but usually get links to it from friends & other sources, never get content thru their portal.

3. I've accepted that online news is a moving target, and the best I can do is keep my feedlist short and relevant to what I'm currently interested in. Social news sites are like bright burning stars that collapse under their own weight as they grow more massive. I agree, Digg is dead, Reddit may be dying... YC News is cool because its still small.
Forget Who Your Customers Are. Focus on What They Want.
You should not use any, if you can get away with it. Start with Hadoop (http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/) and see if you can wrap your head around that first before tying yourself to the RDBMS lifestyle.
Need For Concern - Business Lending Tightening?
Initially, this was a concern only to the housing sector but it seems to be taking a toll on the market as a whole. Is this something that will hit tech startups down the road?
How filmmaking is like launching a start-up
The 10 Most Successful Web 2.0 Startups To Date
Will this hit tech startups looking for funding down the road?
Personally I'd recommend "deeper" (if possible) and "more relaxed" before "louder." At least, that is what you want for an English-speaking audience. If you're loud but your voice is nasal or shrill then you may have the opposite effect.

A deep, relaxed, resonant voice conveys the assurance and confidence you're looking for. People associate it with maturity, wisdom, and masculinity (Think Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones). People associate a shallow, shrill, nasal voice with a whining child. Most people can also recognize tension unconsciously.

The key to speaking with resonance is slow, relaxed, deep breathing (sort of like Yoga breathing). This has the nice side effect of helping you stay relaxed.
Google Mistakes Own Blog For Spam, Deletes It
Building a Robot To Play Guitar Hero
I think a better analogy is the garage bank making a killer album.
Google Offers Cheap Online File Storage With a Catch
postgres is the most flexible option. e.g. the google hibernate shards team mostly works off of postgres, postgres is built with proper transactional support right from the ground up, instead of a table option as with MySQL, and it's more open source than MySQL.

An article I wrote on postgres' scalability before, including some juicy links with shiny graphs:

http://www.zwitserloot.com/2006/12/02/database-land-postgres...

And as you seem to work for oracle, my 'endorsement' of the quality of that particular little blight on this world should make for something nice to report back to Larry.
So they forgot to update their scripts and textures that come with Gimp to this decade. Other than that, I'd still expect it to work for those who accept cheap. For example, take palettes from this http://kuler.adobe.com
ha, exactly my first thought
Putting the Del.icio.us Lesson into Practice, Part II: Feature Creep
I think Google probably cared about Altavista.
It used to be fairly uncommon, but if the number of people starting startups increases 10x or 100x as I've theorized it will, overlaps will start to be more of a problem.
Top Blogs Censored in China
The experiment: I tried to access the Technorati Top 100 list. The blog rankings are determined how many other websites link to these top blogs. I used Safari and the command prompt to see which blog timed-out
Yahoo Launches Green Icon Contest
Facebook data store api thoughts
Be careful this doesn't happen to your blog at Blogspot or what not, it will be more difficult to right that.
Having high standards for graphic design can help. If you're determined to keep your front page clean and simple, that pushes back against the forces that drive feature creep.
I went and listened to it, and it was quite surprising. I had no idea the Zenters used to leave our meetings disagreeing with all my suggestions, and that they only implemented them to prove me wrong.

I remember them saying at the end of the winter that I always "turned out" to be right about design questions. I should have realized that "turned out" implies they didn't believe me at first.
PR & Social Media Still Oil & Water
I thought it wasn't about "Green" but this green: http://www.aboutus.org/UniversalWikiEditButton
Idea: Mechanical Turk for page usability testing?
My company provides a very unique service -- one that is difficult to explain properly in a few words.

As I've worked on designing our web site (particularly the homepage), it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to do some simple testing with something like the mechanical turk: submit a web page to the service, which would flash it in front of a tester for 5-10 seconds, and then have the tester answer questions about their comprehension of the site's purpose and benefits, and perhaps their own objections or responses. (More in-depth testing processes wouldn't be difficult, but that's the first one that comes to mind for me)

I'm working in a pretty unique environment right now -- the market is somewhat small and difficult to target, but ridiculously high-margin (we're looking at creating $500+ profit per user within 1 week of sign-up, essentially.).

With low traffic, it's hard to get solid numbers out of page variation testing, and in a wholly new market, I don't even know if most visitors understand our service, so I see the value in turk-ish testing for myself, but I'm not sure if it would have a broad appeal. Would any of you find mechanical turk-based usability testing valuable?
Question of the Day: What is your primary motivator?
No such luck. The 'More Info' link explicitly says that it works on Mac OS with Firefox.
I actually got to meet Sean Wise a few times and the guy really knows his stuff. he has a website.. www.insidethedragonsden.com which he comments on the show

William
It's much too tantalizing sometimes to think that this next feature idea will resonate with your users; before you know it, your subnavs are completely packed, and you're not even sure what you want your users to do anymore.

Adopting the minimalist approach is both terrifying and liberating, but without question, is much more communicative to users.
Why all the italics?
First look at YC Demo Day
This is very true -- I always have an amazing tendency to talk faster than normal when presenting, and I find that taking the time to calm yourself before talking is effective. But you can always seem to catch people's eccentricities too; I always seem to end up scratching my right ear while talking, and have no idea I was doing it until people ask why my ear was so itchy.

I'll try deeper tones in the future. Darth Vader gets respect, period.
with much better odds...
You'd be better off downloading Inkscape, and using straight up plain fonts, with said Kuler palette, than using that tool. Those are simply awful by any definition, and suggesting them for logos is counter-productive, at best.
The Flipper
friend = fried

the demos would be _fried_ by gazeons. Sigh
Facebook Success Doesn't Equal LinkedIn Death
Web 2.0 meets Web 0.2...
"Should a Start-up Focus on Going Global Right Away?"
Congrats to all the founders, the launched betas look promising.
I thinks 'no'. Betters to dominate an initial niche rather than try and take on the whole world. That's the conventional wisdom, at least.
For desktop applications, having high standards for usability and having an eye for the best defaults can help.
Hee. I guess I do lag. Which is the equivalent Web 2.0 site?
What about Safari? :/
That assumes the niche is centered geographically in the west. Online video is an example where lots of people have interest. I see some limitations with tools like PayPal unable to operate in certain countries. Also, translation is lots of work, best left for later.

But the biggest reason I think it makes sense to keep the rest of world in mind: there are hundreds of millions of potential users. I don't say billions because the percentage of the world connected to the internet isn't big enough.
Good grief.

I feel cheap and used, like a $3 whore.

Or a $3 piece of carpet. Or anything else that only costs $3.
Khoi Vinh interviews Olav Frihagen Bjorkoy, creator of the Blueprint CSS Framework
Give this a read: http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html
Situated Software: "Users By The Dozens"
Forbes Could Acquire Clipmarks
... $3 which would buy about 5/8 gallon of jet fuel for Larry Ellison's Gulfstream V, which, if I had wanted to help pay for, I would have used Oracle on something.
Fitts' Law: A Usability Quiz
Not a bad idea, but how many users could you actually get to come to your office? This would definitely motivate your team. Seeing live people who actually use your product and express what they like about it is great. But in terms of user loyalty, I think there would be maybe 10-20 people who might actually make it down.
What Entrepreneurs Most Want to Know: July 2007's Most Popular Work.com How-to Guides
Interesting read. Moving away from your family is tough and you definitely are taking a chance if you quit your job or move to do the whole YC thing. However, it has been successful for one of the founders of Zenter who just found out they were expecting a baby the day he applied to YC.

Working on projects on the side is great, but if you're in a market with other competitors, you might watch them pass you by.

Anyone know how many YC founders quit their normal jobs after applying and accepting funding?
I think that would depend entirely on the startup, no?

You're not going to get useful answers unless you ask a useful question... perhaps some more info?
The point I was trying to make is that since processors now almost exclusively gain performance by adding cores rather than by speeding up each individual core, a per socket license lets the customer continue to keep the gains from processor evolution.

With Oracle's per core license, if you swap out your dual cores for quads, you owe twice (or thereabouts) as much in license fees, essentially guaranteeing your (some processor performance metric) / (license fee) ratio no longer increases over time.
VOIP Startup Fring Raises $12 Million Series B
Firefox Needs To Go To School
The Facebook Generation Gap
Always bothers me when a joke (even a not-especially-funny one) gets downmodded. Humor deprivation is a disease. What's the problem? It does look like Hitler's basement (ie bunker).

It looks like they're in a wartime bunker, probably with bombs going off overhead, all the while blissfully demoing web applications. It seems absurd to me.
230+ Tools for Running a Business Online
What's the best online payment processing solution?
I'm looking for an online credit card payment processing solution that can handle recurring monthly payments. I'm open to linking off of my site to a hosted provider, so long as I can sufficiently customize the look-and-feel. I'm also open to a lower-level code-it-yourself type of solution. Of course I don't want to spend too much time on this, and I want it to be cheap. :) Thanks in advance for sharing your experiences.