skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An interesting idea but it comes at a pretty high cost. Digg and reddit work well because of the simple design; they are essentially lists of links. This allows the user to go down the list, read what they want and casually vote on links on their own terms. What he describes is a lot like StumbleUpon; the voting results are not as good because it's more involved to browse through sites.
Yeah - thanks for responding to my question on heyletsgo and updating the newest date for it. I'll try to make it this Thurs or next.
The Truth About the Pay Gap
Don't forget IAC (InterActiveCorp), they have been behind many acquisitions in the past several years.

Notably: Insider Pages, Expedia, CollegeHumor, Ask.com, Hotwire, LendingTree and many others
It can be implemented behind the scenes by counting certain votes but not others.
I like this look better. One suggestion would be to make sure left column images are resized to the same dimensions. Your tabular layout will be much improved and much more readable. Other than that - I like it!
I'm sure this graph was generated using Lisp, in just 2 lines of elegant code. Those tangled dates on the X axis don't really matter. It's beauty of Lisp, stupid!
It will save a lot of time..
Stock Market Prediction Widget Game Launched
VCs are not identical with investors.
Thanks! I thought it was a good way to set the site apart from the text based social news sites out there
Can be done by showing, say, 3-4 randomly chosen new articles on the top and then below some separator line may come the hot ones, as usual. It is very likely that even those who never vote would pay some attention to those fresh random items on the top of the frontpage, check them out and eventually vote. In fact, the "new" page is no longer relevant in this case.

Regardless, the original idea is brilliant.
On the graphical look: make sure there is some space of at least 5 pixels between the picture and the text on the right, via CSS probably.

The right column with 2 items hardly makes sense if those 2 items have the same priority as the others. Unless those 2 are special, you really don't need that extra column, I think.

In general, social news with pictures is great, but how about the legal side of it? I mean, pictures. Maybe it's not something to worry about - I don't know.
I wanted to put the four most popular stories 'above the fold' which is why there are two on the right. I had numbers showing their order before I might try to put those back in so it makes more sense.

The legal comment is interesting. I'm not sure of the legal aspects myself. Currently I'm linking to their picture instead of copying it and rehosting it. Maybe that gets me around the legal issue. I assume that is the same thing that Google news does.
Financial Times - Dotcoms start to be lords of their domains
Red flag: he wrote it on the way to and from Stockton.

Seriously: you can't dislike Guy, but does anyone else find his posts less-than-insightful? Am I the only one who thinks he writes like a high-schooler doing a term paper?

The thing that usually bugs me the most is when he writes about how to make it as a startup. He's never done that in his life; he was a last-minute addition to the original Mac team as the marketing guy. Not even the main marketing guy.

And yes, he runs garage.com. But what qualifies him as a startup expert? Certainly not experience.
Learn how the best ones make their money: Getting info from public companies
Thanks for the reply. First of all, I would not take dietary advice from Penn and Teller, just by using common sense and looking at Penn. But, on top of that, you went out of your way to call what I said "bullshit", basing your belief on what a magician said in a TV show by the same name, without ever quoting what the magician actually said.

Also, you claim that people very, very rarely feel hungry when they want water.

It's easy to show you're just guessing. Have you ever eaten a solid meal without drinking fluids? Then how can you be sure that the hunger you felt was just for food, and liquids only to wash it down, instead of hunger for water as well? You can't. It could very well be correlation, and not causation, that when you eat, you want to drink water as well, which means that you were hungry for water all along.

If it's even 1% hunger for water, that proves you are wrong.

Also, there's no such thing as a normal diet.
I am told that most angels and ventures are pretty cold hearted and would not put any money on internet start-ups unless they see an existing revenue stream. Is this true? What are some scenarios in which you can get seed funding for developing a fairly advanced prototype that could attract the clients (the revenue stream generators)?
Bringing Archive Content Online Adds To The User-Generated Content Avalanche
High-tech jobs in state rebound for first time since dot-com bust
Anyone hear from Highland today? [pdf]
Decisions were supposed to come today but I got nothing.
Is it bad to compete with small businesses?
PyDigg - A Python Toolkit for the Digg API
What if your idea will consolidate a fragmented industry and provide stiff competition to 'mom-n-pops'? Is it better if the small businesses tend to not serve the customer well?
Giving Great Presentations: How To Not Throw Up
Bubble 2.0? LOL. So what. Who cares?
Bubble here, Burst there? All bubble & burst mean is more opportunities. Yes. you heard. This Tech Startup Stuff is just like real estate. People make money when the market is hot, but people make more money when the market is fucked up. Why? Because everyone else and their cousin are scared and know someone who lost all their savings. If you see startups shutting down and former entrepreneurs looking for jobs, do yourself a big favor, KEEP GOING or START YOUR STARTUP. Those who made money after the market crash of 1929 were not who sold the days before, but those who bought the days after.
Bootstrapacitor - A meta-startup to keep your energy levels up
This is the renamed, rebranded, and relaunched RejectedByYC.com, previously announced here ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16234 ).

Bootstrapacitor provides a place to show off your work to a bunch of other startup founders without necessarily launching for the whole world to see. When you register your startup, you're randomly assigned to a "demo group" of up to 8 other startups. (The assignment algorithm tries to put startups in the same geographic area together, to facilitate RL meetups.) You can then post feature announcements of everything you implement, and get instant feedback from the members of your group. Until you list your startup as "launched", these announcements are visible only to your group members, so you can put your startup up well before it might be considered ready for the public. You and your group get "karma" based on how many features you push out and how many people look at them or comment on them, so it's to your advantage to release early and release often.

Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a math competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of YCombinator and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate people that show off their work to each other. IMHO, that's far more valuable than money or even the advice and connections: most startups fail because the founders give up, not because they make a single mistake or can't get VC.
Appirio Brings Salesforce to Google Personalized HomePage
It is good to provide customer value. If you can provide a service better and cheaper than the competition, go for it.
Google Personalization Workshop: Gadget Maker and More
What do you mean? He started at least two after Apple, ACIUS (makers of 4D) and Fog City Software. That's two startup software firms he started before he went to Garage.

What I don't like about him is his Donald Trump all-go, no-quit, big brass juevos approach to business. That may work if you want to be the second coming of Larry Ellison, not so much if you want to be the next Sergey Brin.
Don't take the headline too literally. :-)
I can agree that there are opportunities both in busts and booms. However, nobody wants to be working on an over-hyped project. And it would definitely be helpful to know if you are.

Even if your startup is solid, knowing the condition of the market is still important. For example, if there is a bubble, a profitable company might want to seek financing before it "bursts." You'll get a higher valuation, and therefore give away less equity.

Sure, you shouldn't let worries about "bubble 2.0" prevent you from starting your company. But it'd be foolish not to try to learn from the mistakes made in the '90s.
Speculation about Jason Calacanis's next venture
WebFS: a Web of Data
Spinning a Web Search (1996)
Startups - Great ideas vs. Great experiences
"The reason why I don't like drugs: if they are so beneficial, why doesn't the body produce them by itself? It seems to me evolution would have figured out a way to do that by now. If it hasn't, maybe there are some side effects that diminish fitness."

You are forgetting the other side to evolutionary fitness: the environment. Human evolution has been progressively stagnated by the invention of adaptive technology. Being hard of hearing or nearly blind is no longer a deadly condition, hence it no longer prevents procreation, hence evolution doesn't factor anymore.

The human genetic structure is largely the same as it was hundreds if not thousands of years ago precisely because we can use tools to adapt to situations much faster than any evolutionary fitness can proof out and spread through the population.

As for the memory gene of mice, that would only have been important if a better memory made mice more successful at what they do. Evidently in the environments mice adapted to this was not the case.

"Of course evolution might have another "idea" of what is good for us than we do (evolution doesn't really care about us)."

Evolution doesn't have ideas. It does not use reason. It does not think. It exists purely as a pattern of change in species over time. There is no need to give it more credit than that, it is quite powerful enough without the addition of sentience.
As someone who runs a small business as my "day job", I'd say it most certainly isn't bad to compete with small businesses. :)
"He started at least two after Apple, ACIUS (makers of 4D) and Fog City Software."

I don't know anything about Fog City Software (so this probably makes me partially wrong), but he did not start ACIUS. He took over as CEO from one of the founders (chronicled in The Macintosh Way -- and just to prove I'm not a Guy-hater, I have a signed copy of that book). :-) He did start garage.com, so I suppose you could count that as a startup. But he was already rich by the time he did all that stuff (AAPL stock), so in my book, it doesn't really count. He didn't have that feeling of almost-desperation that a lot of us have. He could have just spent his life yachting if he had wanted to.

"not so much if you want to be the next Sergey Brin"

Yeah, I think that's really what bugs me, too -- the Trumpish thing. A lot of his posts seem to suggest "the rules" on how you get a job, how you run a business, how you do a startup, etc. And I don't tend to agree with him -- or I end up finding his point-of-view sort of elitist. "Here's the right way to do X, except the right way is something you probably cannot do because you a) don't know the right people, or b) don't already have tons of cash." That type of thing.

Or maybe he means really well but just rubs some people the wrong way.
99.9999% of the views of reddit and similar are people wanting to see what the hottest current news is. Are you really going to hide it from them?

If not, then are you going to make some votes not count as much as others? Users will hate this.

Another problem is not counting votes from people who go directly to the page!?! Sorry but that is completely asinine. Those blog "digg it"-like widgets are the best form of marketing that these news sites have. If the votes are worthless then the bloggers will ditch you fast.
I'm pretty sure that synchronous XML requests and the certainty that js will be present are exactly what defines web 2.0..
Links could be smaller for easier reading.
1999 called. They want their design back.

But, I sympathize. Our site looks downright old-fashioned, too (I've spent the last month or so working on our new site, and though I think we'll be launching it this week it'll still probably take a few more weeks or work before I'll really be happy with it). Web design is strikingly hard for nerds who don't spend a lot of time doing it.

Suggestions:

Smaller link titles. I can't believe I'm saying this, because most sites have way too small fonts for everything and it's infuriating for those of us with squinty nerd eyes that have been staring at CRT screens since they were TVs.

It's hard to do the "multiple columns of wildly contrasting content" thing well. Most sites look jumbled up, and yours is no exception. Smaller thumbnails of the media links, particularly in the top section, would be a start. Probably dividing it 67/33 rather than 50/50. There's a reason newspapers do it, and a reason Yahoo's CSS bundles don't offer a 50/50 column layout at all--it's hard to figure out what's going on, as there's not immediate focus. It just feels confused.

I agree with the other poster who suggested same-size thumbs. Pick a couple of sizes and styles for everything (everything means: pics, fonts, headers, etc.) and stick to it. You're doing fine on minimizing extraneous color (which could be important with all of the crazy crap going on in the pictures).
Don't be ridiculous. Provide value to people. That's your job as an entrepreneur (hell, as a human being...it's what sets us apart from all other animals). If that value is better than existing businesses, great, you just made the world a richer place for everyone! However, I suspect you won't find that you can just walk into an existing market and eat the existing companies lunch.

You'll be shocked at how big some "small businesses" are, and how effectively they can compete with your new-fangled web-based concept (or whatever). Most won't even notice you exist while you bang your head into the market for three years or so--if you're still in business at that point and have actually acquired a large customer base before hitting the end of your runway, then they'll notice you exist. They'll have plenty of time to respond, either getting smart, or getting out.

Ideas are funny that way...you hit the market with a great, revolutionary idea, and one of the bigger established players spots it two years later and eats your lunch with it. (First isn't a guarantee of winning, or even a good indicator of it.)
what do you think is a best approach for a startup? waiting for a brilliant idea, or starting with a simple idea and then focusing on giving a good experience to your customers?
Nope. He downloads it from the Internet and imports it instead of cranking it out from his head.
This story is really poor without Venture Hacks http://www.venturehacks.com/
Apologies if I came off as too aggressive. I guess you can say that the title -- which at face value made a fairly daring statement -- primed my critical attitude, like many bloggers had to pg's "MS is Dead" article. I may very well have overreacted, so don't take my words too seriously. Clearly you didn't write the article to start flamewars; I could just be an instigator who tries to sound coherent.

Great to hear feedback though, and you found a weakness in my argument. My preconceptions of a "competent programmer" are often based on qualities I wish I had :)
The History of Flickr (audio)
I think a far better tweak for Digg would be to hide the 'who voted for this item', making it impossible to verify that you got what you paid for when you use a Digg cheating site. It might not be as effective, but there would be few (if any) downsides.
The history of flickr (51m 23.3Mb, 2007DEC02) told by flickr co-founder 'Caterina Fake'. Worth listening to because a) it's funny, b) explains development details how flickr grew from gne to a photo sharing site.
There's already a site like this, check out indeed.com

I'm trying to think more about what I would want in terms of relationships, e.g. what kind of company is it, what kind of person am I hiring. Search is pretty well dead, I mean, even google's gotten into the vertical jobsearch market.

I'd like to make this something more like rubyrockstars or joel's board, but with better features. Right now those sites are essentially a bad craigslist clone.
Globalization of norms: Facebook challenges Arab LGBT group
'... Our intent is to create the sort of friendly competitive atmosphere of a math competition or hacker lab. To me, this is the biggest advantage of YCombinator and clones: they create a peer group of motivated, passionate people that show off their work to each other. ...'

Nice work. I'll check it out when the login lets me in. Is there an RSS post per user?
I'm not citing Penn, per se. He interviewed several doctors and nutritionists, they were the ones who stated that additional water in the diet is largely unneeded, and that rumors of chronic dehydration in the general populace are wrong.

Also, Snopes has addressed the topic: http://snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp

Believe what you'd like, but don't try to mislead other people with it.

(Have I ever eaten a solid meal without drinking fluids? fuck yes. are you kidding?)
Good thing you don't have to be able to pronounce the name to sign up.
MIX07: Q&A with Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie
There is an inherent problem with how current voting systems are designed. First of all, democracy isn't the best filter of quality. It is a filter of popularity. A gamed news article, gamed by actual people, is in fact, by vote, popular. And if you were paid to vote, you would still have a memory trace of what you voted for so it makes sense to count it as a click-through anyway.

If people go to news sites like digg looking for "popular" articles, they are mistaken. The popularity meter is supposed to be a filter for quality. Problems arise when people focus too much on the popularity measure itself, rather than the content. This reminds of high school class counsel (or whatever it is) elections... in connection I wouldn't rule out the possibility that digg has gained popularity among the younger user market because of this instant feedback of popularity, which seems to be the mode of highschoolers (in contrast, pg said digg was actively promoted to this audience http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17979 ). Anyhow, chicken and egg; back to voting.

There are several ways to attack the current voting system from different disciplines. You can cite some psychology studies that immediately show how the system falls short of accomodating the will of the user. Some "big brother" study a couple months ago was conducted by placing a plate of candies on a table and allowing people to take as many as they wanted. When a poster of a "big brother" was present, people were more self conscious and took less candy. How does this relate? When people take candy, they don't think, "I want candy" or "I don't want candy." They think, "yummy, take!" or "very yummy, take lots!" or "yummy but big bro is watching, take, but less!"

Now pretend you have a recipe-oriented digg, where good recipes get a yummy vote. See the problem? A recipe is not yummy or not yummy. Sure, there are arguments for the current method. Simplification is one. Another is the ability to make stats of ratings between 0 and 1 and apply, say, bayesian learning. But think of what you end up with. 90% users liked this article. 56% probability this article is popular. Article is 13% good. That's it. 13% good?? What's that? Take a camera for example. After vote, P(good) = 0.96. If I am Mr. Mediocre, fine. But if I am Professor Pro, how do I know which is better, consumer camera A with P(good) = 0.96, or prosumer camera B with P(good) = 0.8?

What's the solution? I haven't seen something very effective as an example. But ideally a voting system will combine the digg style and the old fashioned 5-star rating, having the efficiency of digg but the informativeness of the star rating. I don't really understand why this idea doesn't seem popular... I can only reason that the concept of "voting," modeled after the actual voting system for political candidates, is so deeply ingrained into the minds of the developers; otherwise, the people making voting systems these days are all copying the existing ones.
The second thing. Where is this brilliant idea going to come from? Get started doing something first and better ideas will come. Don't sit around waiting for an epiphany.
Evite threatens to sue Socializr for copyright infringement
Seemed pretty successful to me:

"Adobe buys Macromedia for $3.4bn"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4456895.stm

"The individual products within the Studio solution also remained solid, with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX standing as the company's largest individual product ... The MX family also continued to receive industry accolades."
http://www.adobe.com/macromedia/ir/macr/news/2004/jul23_q104_results.html

"to make an impressive AJAX page requires a ridiculous amount of not very well structured code"
...
", do not invest in a startup that plans to make a straight IDE play."

Why wouldn't an AJAX IDE make a good investment? People would be queuing up to buy it if making impressive AJAX pages is as hard as you say it is.
No RSS feed yet, but I could probably rig one up fairly quickly.

Is there something wrong with the login? Your login status says "Active"...
Sorry, Paul. You're a smart guy, but my fortune cookie disagrees with you.
Look at it from the customer's point of view instead. Is it bad for businesses not to offer competing products and services to you?

Remember you can't put another business out of action, only customers can do that. If you provide a better product or service customers will switch to you. It's democracy in the market place.
That's what just about everybody we ran it by said. We went through several dozen possibilities, but they all either sucked or were just totally nonsensical (startupduck.com?) This seemed like the best option we could come up with.

Ironically, the coworkers I ran it by said "I liked RejectedByYC better". Ah well.
Vote up if you want YC to remember your cookie for longer than a few hours
Required reading for Entrepreneurs: "Economics in One Lesson"
This chapter is particularly interesting: "The Curse of Machinery": http://jim.com/econ/chap07p1.html

"The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat."
Why not just keep both YC programs in Silicon Valley?
Ask YC: How's jaCal (my organizer app) look so far?
Rebrand & New Features: Google IG To Relaunch as iGoogle
This is very much a work in progress. I started this last weekend and I'd like suggestions for the design and feature ideas are more than welcome. Also, I need a better name than jaCal (the .com is taken in any case). I was thinking Organizr, the obvious choice, but the .com for that is taken as well.

Thanks!
-Rudolf O.

Note: If the link doesn't work I'll post the ip addy

edit: I'm on irc.efnet.net #news.yc
the ease of use is pretty pleasing.

it seems to stop at the current end of month though. i can't add future events. even if i could it took me more than 3 seconds to figure out.

also deleting the items on the right pane don't update the calendar immediately.