skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is iPhone-only something to be proud of???

This is the second iPhone-only app I recall being mentioned here. If they are so common, maybe Apple did something wrong, or why is it so hard to write universal apps that ALSO work on the iPhone?
For once I disagree, though: if the promise of Facebook apps was to go to a million users within seconds of launching them (which was the first impression), then being disappointed after five weeks could be justified.

Sure, there will be upcoming successful Facebook apps. But if Facebook is not that viral, why bother, and not go back to growing normal internet applications instead?
You have a great idea, but you're doing so many things wrong, it's amazing. Look at your hosting plan. Totally obscure. You're adding uncertainty. So many little things here and there are wrong, but I see that you're the type of person who only takes advice if it is given with a bucket of sugar, so this is the last piece of advice I'll give you:

Do your thing, bro.
The importance of having a co-founder for your startup
How To Improve Your Office Productivity By Jogging
Isn't what too late?
Now that they've opened it up I consider Facebook to be essentially another web built on top the main web. One that has identity, messaging, sharing, networking, etc built in. Much more literally a web 2.0 than the other definitions of that term.

Assuming the Facebook guys don't do anything weird, it should be a marketplace much like the main web: survival of the fittest. Anyone who thought Facebook was going to let them skip the hard part of "making something users want" was just confused.

I'll be working on Facebook stuff long after the Techcrunch 50,000 has moved on.
Reinventing HOTorNOT
MySpace Likely To Open Platform To 3rd Party Developers
I think if you told it in the right way, people would be fascinated to hear about the mating habits of flying mammals.
Marc spends a lot of time talking about the TC50K. I wonder what fraction of those folks use Facebook on any regular basis. Much like folks that don't use Twitter commenting on its usefulness, I think that the TC50K's opinion doesn't count when discussing Facebook.
Facebook Down for Maintenance?
I don't know like you, but I'm slightly tired of this site ... it's time to take holiday ... week or two.
I like to think of you guys as my co-founders. Hope you don't mind.
the equilibrium solution would be for everyone to link to the most popular destination, so this makes no sense.
Top 10 Reasons for Being a Single Founder

10. You spend 0 time debating technical issues that have already been decided.

9. You spend 0 time refereeing personal differences among the other co-founders.

8. You spend 0 time wondering why they can't keep up with you, or why they're doing something other than what you have already agreed upon.

7. You learn every part of your business. You never worry what's happening outside of "your turf".

6. You can always find a sympathetic ear to discuss a technical, marketing, or business issue. For free.

5. You can always find someone else to socialize with, with no impact on your business. For free.

4. You are not going to get hit by a bus.

3. If your significant other wants more of your time, give them a picture of the new house, car, jewelry, or NBA franchise they will own if they exercise some patience. They're the only other one that really matters.

2. You get real good setting up your schedule to work best for you, with "head down" time, and other time.

And the best reason for being a single founder...

1. You keep all of your equity. All of it.
Zoho and others launch their iPhone specific offerings today.
Overcapitalization
Sure, but not planned.
Doesn't that already happen with the PageRank algorithm?
Wow. Serious outage. Luckily they are not a publicly traded company -- yet.
Seems like you aren't alone, but might be a couple weeks late. Traffic's dropped tremendously, it feels like (then again, so has the amount of startup-related news). Care to corroborate, PG?
Yeah, me too. I'm not interested in the opinions of people who really just seem be saying the same vague shit over and over again. What's the deal with these venture capitalists giving us advice? We're just normal people trying to start off companies and ideas, if you want to tell us shit, tell us shit that we can use. Tell us how to market, how to sell, how to get good feedback from users.

Don't keep telling us how to talk to venture capitalists and what not. It's depressing. This place is a graveyard of hope - everyone here seems to be trying, and everyone seems to be advising - but nobody seems to be succeeding. And those companies that do succeed, hell, you never see them here.

This is a collection of dreamers and people hoping for that big million payout. If I'm going to fail, I'll fail with dignity trying to sell things that people want to buy.
Taking a periodic breaks from any online forum you frequent is generally a good idea in my experience. It helps keep new ideas flowing and helps break bad habits.
Not to defend Google, but in Google's defense...

1. The favoritism for PhD's was probably true in the past, but must certainly be less so now just because Google is growing so large. There aren't that many newly-minted PhD's each year. I know a significant number of people given Google offers right out of undergrad.

2. There are definitely metrics for goodness of search results. Even if you doubt their validity, doing a study by having real people compare results across search engines (blind) and choosing the results they like best can tell you whether Google's preferred to Yahoo!.

3. "Don't be evil" isn't the same thing as "don't ever, ever do anything that could be interpreted as evil by someone." I think the idea is more to try to be a good company in general. Hard decisions like censoring in China will always have to be made, though.

4. They're pretty different in terms of their perks and company culture from your standard company. I think you're being a bit brash re: the going green stuff. That is actually part of the culture--GOOG's had measures to incent environmental stuff for a while. It's not all announced in press releases, however. As for the MSFT/DoubleClick issue, you may be drawing a bit of a false analogy.
It's the beginning of summer. People are off doing summer things.
Read Write Web also talked about this yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31483
Showcase of websites powered by Django
"And those companies that do succeed, hell, you never see them here."

Well...whaddaya expect? They're too busy coding their startups to post on a glorified message board. That's probably also behind the dropoff in activity - many of the top posters here got into the SFP, so they're now hard at work on their projects.

I'll probably stick around here as long as I still have my day job. Can't really work on the startup at work without jeopardizing the IP, so I might as well at least learn about startups in my downtime. But there's eventually a time when you've learned everything you're gonna get off the web and just have to go for it and try...
I applied with a "mainstream bookmarking" idea for YC about a year ago or so. PG sent me a one liner, which I'll forward along to you:

"how is this different from reddit?"
It's good to take a break every once in a while. If you make yourself not check in for a week or two YC will be very interesting when you come back.

In fact, it's an amazing experience to avoid the Internet for 3 days. Try it.
What's my stake?
"Can't really work on the startup at work without jeopardizing the IP"

1. Take the first word of that sentence out of your vocabulary.
2. Work at night. Forget about what might go wrong and imagine the possibilities.

There. You just won half the battle. Just my 2 cents.
That's very true, I used to read and post here much more when I had to be at work all day. Since I quit to work on my startup I don't have nearly to same amount of time. There is a essay I've been meaning to write about taking the plunge and quitting the day job but I don't really have time to sit down and do it.
http://dpaste.com/ is a nice one. It would be useful next time we want code snippets on news.yc.
I agree and I suspect the real reason is that very few people actually need all those consumer internet services or the gadgets built on their APIs. If something is useful you don't dump it after using it for a few weeks.
No-Registration Web services
Haha, 3 days off internet, i havent done that for like a year. its prob a good idea. I like what the guy said earlier. You can read forver on the internet, you just have to do it. After reading the four hour work week, i realised how much time i spend reading stuff i dont need. Pointless reading "how to scale to a million users a day" when you havent even gone live yet. good idea, no yc-news for a week, how about that!
That's old truth, but how can I do jogging when there are three bottles of Budweiser in the fridge.
Ivan you should write a piece about improving productivity with beer!
I didn't take my laptop with me to this year's SXSW interactive (http://2007.sxsw.com/interactive/) and I think it greatly enhanced my experience.

Ironically, I think that tech conferences such as this would actually be enhanced--for (almost) everybody--if computers were generally prohibited at computer event venues. (Flame me not.) :)

If nothing else, it would increase f2f interaction..would it not??

(Wouldn't this be a rather stunning exercise/experiment...if only for a day or 2 at a major conference?!)
Try 3 weeks off the Internet. It rocks.
Agree with point 2 (I'm all about coding all night), but 1 isn't a good idea..

If your IP agreement doesnt already claim ownership over your work inside and outside work, it definitely will at least claim what you do during work hours.

Thats a quick way to lose your job, get blacklisted from other companies, and lose legal ownership over your startup..
I have noticed the drop off too, I has associating it with the end of the application period for YC... That said, the dreary pace does allow us to slow down and focus. I think this would be a great time for us to start some broader discussions and actually have the discussion carry on for a couple days instead of hours.

That said, as someone else pointed out, what really matters is doing things, not talking about em :)
I've often seen a forum's traffic pick up during the summer, as students have more time to slack off.
I forgot to write, it's alcohol free, so there is no impact on productivity :)
I'm about 75% of the way done moving my old wordpress blog to a Django powered site I built, its been a pretty interesting experience.

That said, all these showcases show is that the people who built them are good visual designers, and doesn't really have much to do with Django. Its great that they are good designers, it can be really hard to design a site that looks great (I know I struggle to do so), but how they look doesn't have anything to do with Django.

Dpaste is a cute project, I ended up implementing code highlighting in my blog with Pygments (the library that is used with Dpaste), and its incredibly easy to work with. I'd love to have something similar here... but porting the BeautifulSoup and Pygments libraries over to Arc would be moderately large projects (could we port them over to Dr Scheme and have Arc call that?).
your_karma / total_karma

PG still comes out ahead...
Thanks James. I knew there was one or two missing. I am going to make a list of social networks running out of AZ next.
I (like everyone else) dislike logins, but accusing the people who require users to login to use their content of being greedy is simply asinine. Expecting to be compensated for your content and your work isn't greed, and its a hell of a moral power play to label it as such.

That said, I think the OpenID project is going to be/is a fantastic way to eliminate login barriers while still providing most of the benefits of user accounts. It still needs to be pushed a bit more... I'm all for each child being given an OpenID account along with their social security number ;)
MySpace and Facebook struggling with social network business models
Agreed. My solution: don't EVER sign ANY agreement that dictates who owns what you do on your own time. Not sure? Get a lawyer. Still not sure? Take another job.

(Aside: didn't Lincoln outlaw this in 1863?)
Since when have the opinions of non-customers mattered?

With almost every new idea, you see many posts here or on TechCrunch that say, "I don't get it, won't use it, or already use a similar app."

Most entrepreneurs actually listen to that. Why? Your goal is not to please everybody. Your goal is to release a product. Listen to the people who actually bother to fill out the feedback form because they love the idea and tell you ways to improve it. Those are the ones who WANT to pay you or use your product.

Money is a good barrier to entry that lets you only deal with serious people. But with a lot of new apps being free in order to boost their user counts, and lots of people registering for your service, you REALLY have to increase the filter even more, knowing that 90% of the people who signed up probably don't even care about the concept, as opposed to 1% of the people signing up for a paid service who may not actually want it.

A lot of these VC blogs are just spams to get you to to associate VCs with development. But, really, focus on your product, as VCs will always be there.
So, the blogger is building a business for which conceivably he would like to succeed and sell for millions and one of his gripes is that he doesn't want to pay $26 for the Rails book?

Besides the fact that it is a great book and can answer 95% of your Rails questions, I have a hard time taking him seriously with this statement. Can't shell out $26 for a manual to the platform you are basing your business off of?

What next? Are they hosting their site on Geocities?
I am a single founder. Here at Y Startup I have found that the predominant opinion is that anyone over 30 is, or should be DEAD. In the real world I find that if your not under 30 (me 48), doing a startup with a co-founder is not likely. Young people are intimidated by your age (discrimination?), and most older people have responsibilities beyond themselves which prohibit taking serious risk.

If your like me and have made your bones, and bucks, the risk is non existant. Necessity being the mother of invention, I forge ahead alone, though I often wish I had a partner. I have heard the comments by VC that a single founder model usually fails. I think that is valid. In my circle, I don't know any other single founders, so subjectively speaking it seems that the VC guys are right.

I believe it takes a psychologically unique individual to go it alone. We are as a species evolved to work best in a tribe. Those who stand apart from the tribe and are successful are few and far between.

My list of downsides are:

You make every decision alone.

By definition there is no synergy in a singularity.

VC perception is against you. If your not self funded, your going to have a hard slog finding funds from this group. Keep in mind that poltically speaking, manipulating founders is part and parcel of the VC game. A game made more difficult in a single founder model.

During the early stage, pre employee, you have to be a bright and lucky person to make every right decision on your own. You will make more mistakes.

You better be disciplined. If not your going to fail alone.

The upside you ask?

Only one that I can think of and that is that at the end of the day, since the system is so stacked against you, if you make it, you own it. And that has tremendous rewards. For me it meant very very early exit from traditional work patterns. CHOICE, CHOICE, and more CHOICE about every aspect of what I do. No one interferes in any way when you pay your own way. But, the old saying that its lonely at the top, is no lie. If you can handle that, the rewards are worth it.
Wine 2.0: 6 best websites to discover wine with Web 2.0
Entrepreneur Evolution
Sometimes I can go 2 straight days without talking to anyone. It's a bit weird.

I think having some company and having someone to act as a sanity checker is valuable.

Finding a co-founder for the sake of having a co-founder can be a bad thing. The person you bring in should be firmly on the same page as you are or it's going to be more of a negative thing.

Udi
Motivation and Strategies For Entrepreneurs
Oh, yeah? What a competition! But that's life, no big deal, and I was a bit satirical anyway. :)
I think the critical question is how you'll differentiate yourself from craigslist (free) and, to a lesser extent, eBay.
10. Debating isn't time wasted unless the participants are closed minded. When working with others I respect, I have always found that both sides are willing to defect to the other side, they just want to make sure their side is considered first.

9. This is equally avoidable by finding mature people to work with.

8. I often fall into the trap of thinking others are not keeping up with me, but it usually is just me being arrogant. If you can't take advantage of someone, its usually a management issue. Some people are not worth managing though (too little benefit for time invested), again emphasizing the importance of choosing a good co-founder... obviously not always easy to do.

7. The "go at it alone" approach doesn't scale. We can look at examples like the founder of PlentyOfFish who appears to have done it alone, but what he did was to essentially ignore certain areas he didn't feel like dealing with, and things worked out well, but they could have very easily gone the other direction.

6. You can indeed take advantage of other people and use them without any payment, but you are still taking advantage of them (you're getting something, they are not). Because they won't be fully invested in your company, your practices, or your product (and they won't be, because they are just being used), the quality of their advice will suffer because they will be talking about generic situations instead of your specific one.

5. So can founders with partners. For free.

4. But woah, watch out for those taxis.

3. Look honey, I know I have been busy recently, and I'm still too busy to spend time with you, but you're going to be have a lot of money soon. No, no, no, I don't think you're a prostitute. Wait, no, wait, no, NOT THE CAT...

2. This is really important, and one of the reasons people like working for startups in general, but not really single founder specific.

1. And it may eventually be worth something :)

0. Good list, you put up some interesting things to think about.
Are you really good at everything you need to create a startup? If it's a web startup, I'd say the FIRST team you need is a designer and a few programmers. Nothing else.

So, as a single founder, are you doing everything? Or are you using the "bones" you've made to hire employees? If you have employees, then you really aren't benefiting that much from being a "single" -- you have a team, they are just compensated and motivated in a different way.

In my experience, a person who feels like a co-founder is a billion percent more motivated than an employee or consultant. Given this (and given that you need more than one skillset to build a good startup) why wouldn't you trade some equity to increase the motivation of your team? Surely this would raise your chances for success (which, as we all know, are generally pretty low!).

Unless you are one of those mythical people who are good at everything, you are handicapping yourself. And it's a pretty well-researched fact that two smart people are more effective problem solvers together than one genius.

But, at 48, that may be be necessary... As you say, who wants to partner with an old guy? grin

For the record, I am a 35 year old guy who has also made his bones selling two startups (just about to launch #3). Every time (including this one) I have have made damn sure that I had co-founders that had EQUAL partnership (when I could have gotten away with giving them minority partnership each time).
"1. You keep all of your equity. All of it."

This is my favorite. All of your equity! You, as a REALLY smart entrepreneur, have a minuscule chance of success. 99% of the time, all of your equity is going to add up to nothing. If you could increase your paltry 1% chance by bringing on a co-founder (which virtually every experienced person says that you should), why the hell wouldn't you?

Jealously guarding your equity when it's worth nothing seems silly to me.
Joel Spolsky should probably have done more research. When Townsend was building Avis, he worked crazy hours -- when he sold to ITT, he started slacking off (showing up late, if at all, and leaving early). His bosses didn't like it; he didn't like them. He got away with saying what he did because Harold Geneen wasn't a very sympathetic character, but Townsend's failure was Townsend's fault, and ITT (which made some stupendous sums as a conglomerate) only screwed up to the extent that they underestimated his ability to be obtuse. More information: http://www.amazon.com/Itt-Management-Opportunity-Robert-Sobel/dp/1893122441

And Google, Yahoo, etc., are only barely conglomerates. They've figured out what the conglomerates got right (if you give customers every kind of product they want, they'll have no reason to consider working with anyone else) without repeating the same mistakes (overpaying, buying utterly unrelated businesses). The Google/Yahoo/Microsoft model of conglomerates is great -- it predates the word 'conglomerate' (which, I think, was coined in a Fortune article in the late 50's), since it's what US Steel and GM did early in the last century. The conglomerates Townsend complains about were an artifact of the accounting rules and financial culture of the late 1950's through early 1970's, and there's no reason to consider them a useful analogy with any business trend before or since.

Edit: Also, has anyone seen anything written by Casnocha that's in any way remarkable? It it just the age thing?
Is the web killing our culture? - (37signals)
I actually asked this question a while back and got some good responses if you're interested:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7298
"My point is that statistically most super-successful companies (PayPal, Google, Microsoft, EBay, YouTube, +hundreds more) were started by smart and lucky amateurs, this makes it less likely (statistically) for potential college dropouts to buy house for cash if they go with Max."

You realize that Youtube was founded by former Paypal employees, right?
"This place is a graveyard of hope - everyone here seems to be trying, and everyone seems to be advising - but nobody seems to be succeeding. "

I like that. Goodbye, maxklein :)
Kottke: Facebook is the new AOL
Apple had to pair with a carrier and offer exclusive rights in order to get back in return what they wanted. The ability to control the plan purchasing via iTunes, selling the iPhone out of Apple stores, sell songs directly via iTunes, etc. Carriers still hold the key so it was really the only way Apple could do these things.

And yeah, the end result is that the user is the one who suffers..
Ask Joshua Schachter. :-)
Great feedback it's appreciated and I'll look at integrating it.

On the news feed part, I did int8ially have the question included however there is a limit on the number of chars you can add so if the question was long it would not get added. hence why I went for the standard text.
I don't think the massive decline in signups is an indication that these tools are losing popularity -- it's a reflection of how Facebook users are addicted and the news feed keeps them informed. I'm surprised that iLike and Slideshow and the like still get signups, since I thought that everyone on Facebook would have heard of and assessed them by now.
Social sites battle for new users