skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yahoo Signs Online Advertisement Deal With Comcast, Google Dumped Yet Again
The parent link to this article was discussed:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16687

The presmise of this article annoys me. You don't need to be a "Bayesian statistician" to solve the mammogram question. The solution is an application of Bayes' law.
That's probably indicative of a bigger problem then: the story isn't simple enough for people to grasp immediately.

I know GMail, Livejournal, and most YCombinator startups have a little explanatory text on the front page, but I've been a GMail user for nearly 3 years and a LJ user for 5 and have yet to read the introduction. I signed up for GMail because all my friends were saying "Have you seen Google's new webmail program? They give you a gig of space. Want an invite code?" I signed up for LJ because all my friends were saying "Do you have a LiveJournal? It's like an online diary thing." You could probably sum up GMail with 4 words ("Google. Webmail. One gig.") and LJ with two ("Online diary."). And all the really successful consumer web startups have one or two word summaries: Google ("Search"), Amazon ("Every book"), Ebay ("Auction junk"), Craigslist ("Find apartment"), Flickr ("Share photos"), Meebo ("Web IM"), Reddit ("Share links"), Wikipedia ("Community encyclopedia"), and YouTube ("Share videos"). The only exception I can think of is Yahoo, which may be why Yahoo's recent earnings were in the toilet.

I can't really think of any way to sum up Bootstrapacitor in 2-4 words, which is a real problem. The initial version of the logo had "Hold your charge" on it, but that sounded kinda hokey and doesn't really explain what the site's about. I suspect that putting a 2-paragraph description of the site on the front page won't help, because people won't read it anyway, and even if they did it's not convenient for them to share it. So perhaps the idea itself is flawed until it can be boiled down into a simpler concept.
Here is one, that works on every website:

en.gibney.org/savescroll_info/

Its intended use is to include it in the website, but you can also use the javascript in Greasemonkey. Here is the link to the code:

javascript.gibney.org/savescroll.js
Document Arc Diagrams: Illustrates connected segments of a document that share a similar vocabulary
Interesting ... they're very cheap and the standard servers are not bad either.
Ouch ! They're expensive ... but as you say, maybe when it's time to upgrade.
"The outstanding question is whether Microsoft plans to offer Silverlight support for Linux."

Yay... another potential headache for Linux users. Flash, WMV videos, and Java applets are bad enough, but there are at least solutions out there for those. I can't imagine Microsoft trying too hard to get this working in Linux, and it appears that websites like MLB.com already plan on using it.

I also didn't see any mention of supporting Firefox, so the problem may be bigger than just Linux users.
I disagree. Since I spend a total of less than a second on the login screen whenever I log in, I could care less what I see.
Microsoft Joins The Party, Buying Internet Advertisement Firm 24/7 Real Media for $1 billion
Everyone was saying that the YouTube deal was a bad idea because of the copyright issues. Of course, Google knew about these issues as well. I can't help but think now that they had this in mind all along, to buy them and then duke it out with a major media giant over copyright laws. Surely, if they win this case, that would set some major precedence which might help other areas they are in as well.
The point that you are making was explained in detail by some fellow in a post titled "Maybe Google Wanted to be Sued: YouTube and Plan B"
http://www.michiknows.com/2007/03/14/maybe-google-wanted-to-be-sued-youtube-and-plan-b/

The post is really thought provoking and got Digged, slashdotted and reddited.

Do give it a look
Why not just co-locate a box of your own?

What I did:

Assemble random crap box from parts (Athlon 2100+, 512 MB RAM, 80GB HDD) This was free for me, and should be cheap or free for you. It was also two years ago, so you can probably find better hardware now.

Leave box at parents' house using cable modem for 2 months (free, but slow)

Co-locate box at Sprocket Data in Dallas for 6 months ($60/mo for 100 GB traffic, 100 mbps burst)

Then things changed a lot, but my startup has always owned all the equipment.

I like being able to fix problems myself when needed.
We had good luck getting interesting designs from this site, we are actually in the final stages right now. We were waiting to complete the full purchase before posting about it. So far I would highly recommend it as an interesting way to get a large variety of interesting ideas. The costs range from $150 to about $300 or so for most logo contests that I have seen.

If your interested I highly recommend browsing other peoples public logo forums to check out the kind/quality of work being produced.
I love "Economics in One Lesson"---I've even bought extra copies just to give to friends and relatives---but I'm not sure it helps you all that much as an entrepreneur; understanding the Broken Window fallacy doesn't help you make things people want. Judging from their public statements, many successful entrepreneurs are simply rotten economists. (But then, so are many economists!)
You can also use the mouse's middle button.
Wrong; the article only claims they are one of two potential buyers. And that's only if you trust an exclusive from the NY Post. Any Internet news that only the Post knows is probably wrong.
Go BIG Interviews Guy Kawasaki: Avoiding Common Pitch Mistakes
"They then iterate till they get it right, and don't get paid till you choose one."

That sucks. I'd hate the be the graphic designer. How can you get good quality from someone who doesn't care about getting paid?
Here is a Basic Private Messaging Tool for news.yc Users
Here's a sort of proof of concept for an interesting URL usage; augment by snap-on, versus plugin.

This is a simple little utility that sends browser requests using PHP/cURL, and puts/fetches stuff from a mysql database, meant to provide a substitutional private messaging function for news.yc users who want PM functions.

"Login" with your news.yc account information. It will relay this information to news.yc and check the headers for pass/fail. Your password is discarded after the relay; if the test passes, it saves your username and uses that to post to mysql. The target user with the matching username will be able to check for "messages." You can reply, or delete messages. Messages older than a week are automatically deleted. The login source code is publicly viewable... for now, just in case you want to see when the password variable is discarded (lines 29 and 30). If there are huge problems, do tell.

Also, if you care to use this, the auto-refresh is done using a META refresh every 5 minutes. Type fast and short, I guess.

Again, this is just a rudimentary tool which I hope some people will find useful (and msg me if you want) until pg decides to add PM functions (or demands a takedown) :-)
Any links to good analyses of whether Google will win?
Very interesting - are they able to understand context, or is it simply text string matching. I think it is the latter, but the former can be used to start working on the latter.
Condemned To Google Hell
I'm starting to think that e1ven was right:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=3930
Of course, everyone is rooting for google because they love their free content, but when you seat people on a jury, then tend to take things seriously.

The law says "don't do X".

Google does "X".

...15 minutes of deliberations later...

Google is found liable for doing "X".

It's really straightforward, and arguments about information wanting to be free don't really work in a courtroom setting.
"Why not just co-locate a box of your own?"
"Co-locate box at Sprocket Data in Dallas for 6 months ($60/mo for 100 GB traffic, 100 mbps burst)"

Because it's too expensive when you're just starting out. I could afford $60/mo, for instance (because I'm older and have lots of kizzash) but I'm hosted for $8/mo with 1.5TB of throughput.

If your site gets much traffic, you'll be over 60GB before you know it. :-o
I think you're right about it being the latter. What's cool about this is that the arcs illustrate the 3 acts that (usually) make a speech or story well structured.
Virtual hosting is always an option, then -- cheaper than having to pay for a physical server (or its rental).

And eventually we'll have Amazon E2 ... eventually ... and with that, you can control the (virtual) server and deal with scaling issues.
Whoa... you sure about the robot? If it fits into some grand vision I'm sure there are creative people who can integrate it somehow.

I have attempted a chrome effect before and I feel without further training I won't match the pros. My designs are plain, and I like to merge text into the picture. I don't have good samples with me but here are two.

http://www.withmsg.com/1.gif http://www.withmsg.com/2.jpg

rather obscure, but the text reads to "pktw."
if you like this style, yes I have one or two sketches in mind. If you'd like to blend some text in, the first letter maybe, I need to know that. Finally, if you want a vector file I probably won't be working fast -- because sadly I don't have AI. And I'm very unfamiliar with inkscape. What I'll end up doing is roughly tracing a paper sketch. You'd need to get somebody to smooth out the edges after that.
Didn't knew New York Post has such a great reputation, but alot of people are jumping on it
http://www.techmeme.com/070501/p26#a070501p26
Thanks for the link. That's basically the idea that I was considering, but obviously more in depth.

It was a very good post.
Homebrew and How the Apple Came to Be
The Pita Principle for startups| Nirvana through bootstrapping [Aug 2001]
First there were DoS attacks and now we have the potential for spam farms to link to one site sending it to google hell.

Yikes!
Exactly - the dark side of Entrepreneurship. Risk is real and can lead to financial disaster. I would recommend that the more you have to risk, the better a business chance your startup needs to be.
Nah, the robot's not neccessary. I don't need any words or letters in the logo, just a picture. I'd probably want a vector a file though. Well, don't worry about it if it's too much work. I'll probably end up using one of the pay services suggested in this page.
Mr. Graham take note, so when I reapply to YC for my bondage-centric start-up we can become much richer.

There is a thin line between pain and profit.
Ad Exchange Gold Rush Continues, ContextWeb Also Launches an Ad Exchange called "ADSDAQ"
And they cite the Post. That's how bad information spreads...
Murdoch going after the WSJ
It should be "Thats how the rumor mill works" :)
This seems like an interesting way to tack on community functions to any web site on the Internet. The hard part is to get users to trust you with their username and password, but perhaps the spread of OpenIDs could help that situation for you.

Have you given any thought to turning this idea into something more? The withmsg.com domain name should work great for any site.
Try a Xen VPS, you get full control of your own OS image with no hardware to worry about. Amazon EC2 is Xen-based but you can find much better prices. I recommend serveraxis.com where you can get a VPS with 1GB of RAM and unlimited bandwidth @ 10mbit/s for $130/m (or $45 for 200GB/m).
Floats can drive me nuts. Good reads; thanks.
I had the same idea a while back :)
I am somewhat suspicious that Xobni has no value to offer. Their evasive website recalls Mr. Graham's (or some other entrepreneurial evangelist's) insistence that if a company cannot tell you what they do in a sentence, they should go home. I agree that business targeted towards the masses (note that Xobni seems to only support Microsoft products at present) must have an easily understood purpose. What purpose does Xobin they serve?

In the entire length of their website, they do not explain what they do. They certainly don't in a single sentence. Perhaps, the magnitude and source of their investment suggests they are on to something. But, what explanation they have reeks of charlatanism in platitudinous corporate doublespeak: "in-depth analysis" that "takes email productivity to a new level." Please. This of course raises the questions what do they analyze? And how do they improve productivity? Either they have something to hide or nothing to offer.

Recall that Mr. Graham insists that there are no ideas worth protecting with secrecy; either Xobin disagrees (actually I do as well) or they have no good ideas at all.
What a funny article. Who wouldn't want analyst storage briefings through Second Life?
Are there good solutions for age verification?
One of the projects I am currently involved with features erotic content. For the time being we have eliminated all pictures that could be illegal (at least in our country), but it would be so much nicer to have a reliable age verification system.

Are there any good solutions for that, preferably covering as many countries as possible? For example, I am pretty sure that for Germany the standard "credit card check" is insufficient, as the law will just argue that "the child might borrow the credit card". Would it be sufficient for the USA, and is there a way to check the country of origin that our users are coming from?
for the do-it-yourselfers, here's a link to quickly evaluate what you've done. Peachpit press is very well known in the print graphic design crowd.

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp?p=676596&rl=1
[totally edited]

Sorry, this is more of a legal, rather than technical question. Did you do a google search? http://www.idology.com claims to have something.
My understanding of the DMCA is that as long as sites promptly remove copyrighted materials they are not in violation of the law. Rather than arguments about "information wanting to be free", I think we'll see a lot of obtuse arguments about what engenders "prompt removal", etc.

On the topic of copyrights and the web, what I'd like to know is how Pandora was so successful in getting licenses for all the music they use.
If they are intent on supporting OS X, it seems quite likely that support for Linux will be technically feasible. Originally I was really bewildered by the MS decision to mimic Flash, but they really have done a pretty decent job with the .NET framework. Maybe the competition between Flash and Silverlight (which, btw, is a great name) will force one of them to opensource...
I have googled, but it is difficult to judge the services that come up. (Edit: just found that Idology seems to verify based on street address - good enough for a mail order company, I guess, but probably not for access restrictions to a web page?).

It is of course a legal question, but also a technical one. For example it is a technical question if I can determine the country my user is coming from. I suspect not, though (user could use proxy in other country) - or at most, one could determine a probability and then it would again become a legal question.
I was sort of surprised the first time I learned that anyone would give you financing for debt. Even at a 20% discount rate, it seems like a successful startup should be increasing their valuation by a lot more than 20% between rounds.

Conversely, debt seems like a really bad deal for investors. They only get a 20% discount when the company goes into Series A financing, in return for the risk that the company will go belly up before then and they lose it all.

How does this square with the (admittedly problematic) conventional wisdom that investors look for a ~10x return on their money and expect ~1/10th of companies to fail?
Funding startups with debt is extremely risky, unless it's convertible debt, which is just a hacked form of equity.

The reason is that a typical loan will be secured by the company's stock. If you fail to repay it when it's due, your company will be forfeited to the lender. It's bad to make deals like this in a situation where things can change so fast. Viaweb was almost destroyed when we couldn't repay a bridge loan that we'd taken in order to see us through an acquisition that then didn't happen.
Kinda sad we need this...
Does Google also send you to hell if you have paid Google for advertising your site? At least if you pay for an ad, hopefully the spider would use it as some sort of indicator?
I believe this article discussed only convertible debt, and only regarding seed-round funding.

No matter what the situation, though, aren't the investors going to own your company if you really run out of money? And if your company is doing just fine, shouldn't it be easy enough to get another loan/investment to keep the creditors at bay?
I'd love to see this tiny bit of Ajax on news.yc itself -- but in the meantime, good job!
Lord I would love a script that marks all the articles on news.yc as "read". I would also love a place to put these suggestions without spamming everybody!
I am fairly certain that it is possible to determine country by IP. I have seen this done before in several cases: some products with encryption are illegal to "export", and thus restrict the IPs that can access them. Also, I have seen the same for content providers who only have a license for a certain market (specifically I have seen a Japanese company restrict their content to "Japanese IPs").

You make a good point about proxying through different countries, but I don't think in you would be liable for that. Often these things work on some sort of a "reasonable effort" type clause, because its impossible to verify with complete certainty someones age programmatically.

Perhaps asking them trivia about music that was in style two decades ago...
Do you know if this is now documented anywhere? Even on a third party site?

Testing: italic bold [link](http://benhoyt.com/) -- hmmm, can you do named links?
But it's an increase for guys who were basically using S3 to serve as a way to get their web pages to come up snappier by having S3 serve their many requests for small incidental images. Reddit, for example. They were nickel and diming S3 (well, really $0.00001 and $0.000005-ing), of course totally within the terms of the service, to Amazon's chagrin. Even with the new charges though, it's a great deal for that kind of hosting.
It's just a joke, bud. Have a laugh. I'm not implying that we should uproot PG's essays because of a fortune cookie. I just got it and thought of the essay.
I noticed on a few commercial sites (I believe it was an Anheuser-Busch site) that asked for your name and city, state (and possibly email for unique identifier?). Then, it magically age verified you. It was pretty nifty.

I believe they must have used a product like ChoicePoint's Age Verification (http://www.choicepoint.com/business/financial/ageverif_fs.html). Basically a database of public records.

Hope that helps,
Wayne Chang
The article discusses convertible debt.

Even convertible debt can be dangerous if you don't raise a Series A before the debt comes due. The solution is to negotiate the right to convert the debt to equity at the company's option if the Series A doesn't occur before the debt comes due. We'll discuss this in an upcoming hack.
Another interesting option and cheap too, thanks.
I suspect just verifying by name and address would be too easy to hack by the kids? Just enter their neighbour's address and name...

Personally I would consider credit card ownership as sufficient, as I think they are only handed out to adults? If a kid steals the credit card it is probably so spoiled already that some erotica won't do much further harm... But the law doesn't agree everywhere.
I'll refrain from making any MySpace jokes. It's depressing enough as is.
Living online, with web apps
Amazon S3: New pricing model
problem with the $8/mo-type services is that you're limited as to what sort of tech you can use
Primarily Serverbeach. Have one server with Layered Tech and one with Linode for internal
Ug. That band at the bottom of the page is intolerable...
Sonopia Raises $12.7 Million in Series B Funding for Mobile "Social" Network
True, although some providers are more liberal than others. Dreamhost lets you run your own stuff, like ruby, php, rails, etc. But yeah, it's a limited environment, and you're sharing. When you're first starting out, you may not care about that. But eventually ...
The Reason Why Digg Removed That Story
Can anyone tell me what bandwidth costs a month once you need over a terabyte a month? How would you host a 5-10 mb movie that may be viewed millions of times without using a 3rd party video host like youtube etc?
The other big downside is that you can't just go in and kill an errant process if your alpha version does something weird.

And you're also in the dark about what those other processes (those not owned by you) might be doing at any given time.

Controlling the entire server as root is just better.
Glorb.

Great Value, Great Service

http://glorb.com
stuckunstuck (twitter as gateway)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
Since you helped me much - with juwo, let me give it my best shot.

I assume you are trying to beat them at it.

Suggestion:

Make email, the frontispiece.

surround it with the flora that people can pick and choose.

for example, I want weather and news headlines. (Yes, I am boring).

So in a nutshell - on ONE page, email, news headlines, weather, banner advts.

thanks,

Anil
noticed it this morning from twitter, chris massina (http://twitter.com/factoryjoe). In effect the site filters directed twitter messages to two (N possible) categories. In this case "stuck" and "unstuck". So you get 2 lists of messages by persons on what they are currently stuck (stuck) on and not stuck on (unstuck).

HOW:
Uses twitter to send information to a third party site. Categorises the message you send to twitter to stuckunstuck by using 2 further twitter accounts (stuck & unstuck accounts ~ http://twitter.com/stuck & http://twitter.com/unstuck) and directs messages sent to these accounts to the SUS site.
Me too, thats why I posted it
There's more to this than meets the eye. Making it sound like this is Google's fault is obviously stupid and I'm sure the folks at Forbes know that. This is more of a give-Google-bad-press campaign by some incompetent media people.
Since you helped me with juwo, let me give it my best shot:

The first question in my mind: how does it compare with Google/Yahoo's calendar?

Instead of trying to compete head to head with the giants,

can you instead (say) write a desktop widget that will read Gmail/Yahoo calendar (assuming it is logged in) and generate the TODO list?

Currently, they are a pain to use to generate TODOs. I simply use a text file instead. But they are good for reminders.

so if you can use both TODO + reminder, that will be great.

And please, contradicting PG and all the gurus on this board, DO NOT store my data on your server!!
I'm planning to have a Google Calendar importer. I might just do that via iCal though...

What do you mean by your last remark? Don't store your data on my server?
Yahoo finally gets a 10 pagerank
Just noticed the whole line was green for the first time on the google toolbar while I was on yahoo.
Wow. This greasemonkey script replaces explicit links with xmlhttprequests. Could we do something similar with the reply link as well? That's been a long-standing feature request when submitting reddit comments.

My horizons for what users can contribute to websites have dramatically broadened.
Suggestion: focus on Grief Recovery.
No concerns about inaccessible data, or security, or back ups. or vendor lock-in?
Google Hell is the worst fear of the untold numbers of companies that depend on search results to keep their business visible online.

I.e., companies that do not offer much to distinguish themselves from dozens of others just like them.

Is it not common sense by now that you do not base your business well-being on what some other company happens to deem relevant or noteworthy?