skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You do realize that this would be the death of so many startups, right? They're already demonstrating that they would rather lift ideas from other companies than buy anyone.

I don't care for the founders much at all. They obviously got very lucky in choosing their product. Their technology is as boring as they come (PHP et al.)

More that I don't like about facebook, the product:

They "sell" privacy. So much of their marketing revolves around the idea that what you do on facebook will only be known among those you want it to. And yet here, facebook fails miserably. It lets in exactly the worst people: law enforcement, employers, school officials.

Oh and the content of their photo galleries is trash because the design encourages people to upload every single picture on their harddrive. Early, early myspace even had them beat in this area.

I don't know, I just never liked it or them much at all.
Thanks guys. We'll be pitching at The Next Web (Amsterdam) 1st of June and from there on out market a bit more aggressively. Software's almost done.

--Reinier, http://tipit.to/
TechStars "Funding your startup" session - open to general public
Learning from Levi Strauss and Leland Stanford
1. I followed my friend's band to Myspace, didn't create an account. Then eventually created an account to add some friends I found. It was never mass-marketed to me.

2. MySpace is not spam. There is a concentrated level of marketing, and it is sometimes obnoxious, but you could say that about Times Square. Marketing itself is not evil. Some people love watching movie previews. Myspace does not hamper my ability to use email, nor do spammers on myspace interfere with my ability to use it. I don't mind getting friend requests and event requests from Bands, and honestly I don't even mind the "Click for Nude WebCam" spam. If MySpace spam bothers you that much, it's easy enough to simply shut down your account, create a new one, or change your email address. But again, the product as a whole isn't spam at all.

3. I really don't care whether Tom created MySpace or not. I think it's an effective way to handle customer service.

4. Chris DeWolfe sounds like he might be a Bad Man, but how does that relate to the product?

5. What is bad about MySpace being a direct assult on Friendster?

While I appreciate the information, and am glad to see someone sharing it, the tone of the article is very sensational.
Good luck.

http://www.eff.org
Well, #news.yc on efnet is always here if you want to pop in and chat. Activity has waned though, I think due to others using other IRC rooms and others using Meebo. So I hope we can all decide on one set place to chat because I definitely would love to chat with a lot of you guys.
Sam_Odio must be busy. :P
I am not. He's a fraud.

http://www.aarongreenspan.com/read/
You can see how absolutely horrible the site looked here.

Umm. The site still looks horrible.
I heard about Y Combinator from a number of sources which I can't remember now. I found the forum from there and liked it quite a bit.

I've never heard of startupping.com, and news.yc has more than enough for me to digest at the moment.
Maybe the solution is a chat feature integrated with News YC?
"In British English, it is generally accepted that collective nouns can take either singular or plural verb forms depending on the context and the metonymic shift that it implies."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun
It gets weirder and weirder thinking about how he's the same guy I roomed with 7 years ago at summer camp.
I only read starting at p. 294, but don't think Zuckerberg came off too badly in your recounting. He was impatient, aggressive, and calculated he could do the social-network thing better on his own... and it looks like he was right.
BTW, if want to milk your experience for attention, you could position yourself as "Mark Zuckerberg's Gary Kildall".
Yes. Of course, you lose the HD contents if you release the instance, or for other occasional failure and system events.
The conclusions of this article may not necessarily be wrong (everything gets killed eventully), but it pretty spectactularly misses the point of 20% time. The interesting part of 20% time is that it is not about what management thinks, but about how much momentum you can get on your idea yourself and with others you can attract and motivate. I don't work there, but from my understanding the idea is that mgmt can't reject an idea per se -- if you want to work on it that is your call.
'... Nick Bradbury ...'

I'd read about Nick Bradbury. Been doing desktop based web stuff since '97. He's also the startup anti-pattern as a one man business (to my knowledge) & multi skilled.
Could open email work for you?
Facebook: Got it backwards?
I think a better model would be just to get users paying five bucks a month, and then to evenly divide that up among the stories each person votes for. Then you just have to get 100 users to sign up to get the thing underway. With the current strategy both the amount you are expected to pledge and the number of people needed to get the thing to hit it's tipping point are kind of nebulous.

Anyway I like the idea. I'll probably sign up once it's out.
thanks sharpshoot you get the useful part of letting people know
It's an idea I've had before. In fact, I alluded to it on a previous news.YC thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=8545

I still think that creating the technology for this would be a great startup.
CC licensed DVD images available on my private ftp server
So who else has extra bandwidth? I've got something like a TB of bandwidth to use and would love to trade files with anyone interested. Email me.
Have anyone tried doing 2 startups simulatenously?
how was it? Do you regret it?
Mostly out of laziness in not wanting to have lots of networks open, I opened up a #news.yc on freenode, which has a few people on it from time to time.
well teenwag is growing faster than myspace and facebook ;)
it is teenwag
Looking for a job? Want to hack for Justin.tv? Email michael@justin.tv today!
No, but an IRC channel listed on news.yc would help funnel people to the channel rather than just when someone randomly comes across it in a comment.
Sounds like a bad plan to me.

On the other hand... maybe testing the waters with a few different things, and being flexible and willing to experiment might not be stupid. I'd guess that it's better to be sequential rather than parallel though, in order to focus on one thing at a time.
This is called SEO tiny site beats the crap outta Youtube for even the hotttest video
http://teenwag.com and http://myspace.com both doing very well
it is fricking awesome
http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=Shakira+Las+De+La+Intuicion+video
Tiny site fighting it out with myspace and youtube and braving Google monopoly t.e.e.n.w.a.g the real site with schwag
Not the only thing.
Apparently a lot of the people who are making this kind of comment about the Facebook API haven't actually given it a good look. Their original API does exactly what she's asking for: it let's you use Facebook's friend data, among other things, on your own external sites. This new version still does that, but it also allows you to embed your application inside of Facebook, as well as add data from your application, like Twitter updates, to people's profiles. If you don't want to embed your app inside of Facebook, you don't have to.

Facebook has added features that make it far easier to find and use external applications based on the API, but for some reason people think that's a bad thing? I don't get it. Yeah, if your app relies heavily on Facebook you'll be locked in, but every other API has that same effect. It's the nature of the beast.

I think the reason why this is throwing people off is because Facebook really isn't a discrete application itself. When you use the Google Maps API, you're building on top of that map and embedding it directly into the page. You basically get everything Google was already offering in that widget. With the Flickr API, you get to do neat things with pictures, and put those in your pages. With Facebook, what would you be embedding? At its most basic level, Facebook is the friend graph, with all sorts of other things piled on top of it. Most of what you care about is who is friends with who, and it's harder to visualize that than it is with most other sites out there that offer APIs.

But anyway, they didn't get it backwards. They made the API more valuable to third party developers by integrating it into the site more, while still giving you the freedom to have your entire site live outside of Facebook. In turn, that will make Facebook more valuable to its users, which is kind of the whole point. I guess people expect offering APIs to be some sort of act of altruism.
Why would people do that? ;-)
Actually bookmarking is an issue with what I am doing so for now I'm using a redirect to get the url cleaned up. For example if you want to get timetable from London to Brighton then you search and the results are on a url like /timetable/london/brighton.

There is a way to change the url but that only half works for me. I still get urls like timetable/?from=london&to=brighton
Pics: A Day at Xobni [YC startup]
Yes, I've occasionally lost focus. I'd recommend against it.
Digg unveils data visualization finalists - know anyone?
I hope that doesn't mean you're quitting Valleywag!
How I work: don't just cope with information -- revel in it
First off, I like the elegancy of the CPS approach, however...

The continuation-passing approach doesn't scale. Not only to multiple machines, as papersmith points out, but on a single machine. news.yc has (had?) problems with a theoretical DoS which pg has acknowledged in email: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18083 (post formatting corrupted by pg hiding then unhiding the post).

Dave Roberts has an interesting write-up of the approach: http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2004/11/web-application-design-rest-of-story.html In email he said that talking about it with pg one time, pg made clear that for Viaweb it was only used for the web site the merchants accessed, not the many hoards of customers who accessed "normal" links, and only the links on the current page for that merchant worked, i.e. if you pressed the browser's Back button all the links on that old page were broken and the server would just present you with the current page again. In summation Dave said if your site is small enough continuations may work fine, but if it's meant to be the next big thing use REST and I agree.
Use facebook?  Try the new Scribd app for facebook for document sharing
What if the 2 startups are complementary?

Like say, you are doing a dating site and a social networking site, which was the case for Intermix Media, parent of Myspace
The "give us your email address to hear future news" form isn't working. There's no response from dreamhost as at 2007-05-26 13:12:48 +0100. Can you let us know when it's back?
Then run them as one company so you can spend half as much time talking to VCs.
Dreamhost is wonky a lot, of late. From time to time it sort of goes down for a couple of minutes, then comes back later.

We'll get the 1U installed at a colo facility soon and move this page over.
'get users paying five bucks a month'? Sounds difficult.

I'll leave that to another enterprising soul. I think that's best left as an add-on of sorts to existing aggregators.
Web application design: the REST of the story (Also see linked long email discussion)
It's hard. ;-)
I'm running my own (small) business while working very hard at launching our startup. It's really hard, because you have so many people to keep satisfied (well, in my case at least); e.g. clients and partners.
But if you think you can do it....
Thanks to Ralph's post on UCW:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=24783
Last.FM Too Slow: Users Create Their Own Facebook Application
JJ Allaire
As far as I know there aren't any good irc channels for startups. Founders tend to be rather busy so asynchronus comms such as news.yc works better.
How about some details for potential applicants? Phrase "hack for" can have 6 dozen meanings...
These guys are quick...
How do you take payment from me when you come calling asking me to cover my tip pledges? Say it's Visa. They charge for that so how do you cover your costs? I like the idea of asking the content authors to tip you in turn when you pass the tips onto them, but is it those tips that you're relying on to cover costs or do you ask me, the original tipster, to cough up the tips + a processing fee?

It's a great idea and I'd like to see it succeed.
Slightly more info at http://justintv.blogspot.com/2007/05/justintv-is-hiring.html
Hmm ... I can envision a new startup created just to add this feature to news.yc! ;-)
I'm working as an employee for one startup and a founder of another, in two totally different business domains (financial software and internet games, respectively).

It's hard. Startups take more out of you than a regular job will, because you can't just switch into maintenance mode. There've been times where my boss has had a demo for an important client one week (making me work nights & weekends for a couple days to get it ready), and then I've gone straight to preparing a launch for the startup.

I don't think I really could've done it differently, though. I wanted to work at a startup so I could get experience & a sense of what I was getting myself into, and this is my first job since college. The day job is essentially funding my startup - it pays better than YCombinator, with similar advice & experience benefits. I thought about switching to a less intensive job at a big company, but I dunno if they'd hire me when I already have a startup on the side. Plus, I have a pretty good relationship with my boss and the IP policy is relatively lenient at my current employer, reducing the chance of IP problems (he doesn't care as long as I'm not starting a competitor, basically).

Overall, I wouldn't recommend it unless you're in a similar situation - first job out of college, self-funding, and want the training of a startup. If you're older and already have plenty of experience with business, I'd get a job at a big blue chip where nobody knows what anybody else is doing - a coworker said that Thomson Financial is great for this, almost everybody has their own private business that they run out of their cube because the company is incapable of getting anything done itself. If you can get YCombinator or similar funding, I'd take that: you're trading equity for time, which is usually a good tradeoff. If you can afford to, quit your day job and live off savings (I'll probably do this fairly soon, but I want a little more runway so my startup has a greater margin of safety).
Do you think it violates restrictions 7 and 1 in the TOS?

"You will not:"

(vii) to create an index, accessible through the Facebook Site, of copyrighted materials that have been uploaded or otherwise made available by other Facebook Users, or for the primary purpose of facilitating the distribution of copyrighted content without the authorization of the copyright holder;

(i) in a manner that infringes, violates or misappropriates any third party's intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights or that is misleading, deceptive or fraudulent;
What, only copyrighted documents exist in the world?
Thanks for your question! Yes, almost everything that is created is copyrighted to the creator, automatically.

The only items that have no copyrights are public domain items. The only way to have public domain items are after the copyrights expire many years later, or if the copyright owner declares it so before the time it happens automatically.

I agree that scribd should try it and see what FaceBook says later. I was just pointing something out of interest to them since nobody else probably actually reads those agreements. :)
looks cool http://www.teenwag.com/
http://www.teenwag.com/ teenwag is making sure all the good ideas killed by myspace and facebook go to users
dont be scared of teenwag Ycers, we ll kill all your software like microsoft ;) LOL
Software needs to heed Moore's Law says Intel
I only have 2 words to say "mein kampf"
No, Google will be killed by people who it rejected to take.
I have noticed this slowdown as well. Mainly links lingering on the frontpage for more than usual. Perhaps it is cyclical.
I haven't implemented mass user-generated subdomains in PHP or Python, but it certainly was a snap to do in Rails.

User-created subdomains didn't seem like they really caught on until 37 Signals started having huge success.
Is YC News on to something?  New site allows you to create a content-specific digg/reddit.
I love these new startups: like reddit, but unsuccessful.
Unique IPs/day are still climbing. Pageviews per IP are down, however. I think your theory that it may have something to do with application cycles is correct. There are now about 50 people who are extremely busy with new startups.
Article also fails to mention he got a boost from adding fake profiles (mostly of women) early on.

A forum post of his asking about how to do this is archived on the net somewhere.

... not that I've never done anything greyhat either.
precisely. some people just don't get it
Preparing a marketing plan for your startup
How many of you have a comprehensive time-phased marketing plan for your startup that goes beyond getting on digg, techcrunch and delicious?
Gates and Jobs: Same stage, same time
Ask Slashdot:  Simple, Stand-Alone Internet Communication Devices?
The high price of creating free ads
Aye, playing with facebook platform here.
Google Web Toolkit 50 minute presentation
Attendio Tracks Local Event Information
New York Times Will Lower Editorial Standards Online And Reduce Size Of Print Newspaper
Nexo - Free and Easy Online Groups
For an Italian it is very hard to understand how it is possible that the kind of advertising Google, Xobni, and other companies do in order to attract employers can actually work.

I mean, to have something to drink it's ok... and even the cool Ikea desk, but this here matters 0.001%... instead the stress is in the following stuff:

1) What I'm going to do there? I'll have chances to learn more?
2) Salary, is high enough?
3) Environment: it's a too big and chaotic city? Are my coworkers handy or a bunch of antisocial nerds?

After one week two displays, the cool furnitures, and so on will matter zero, it's all the rest that will do the difference.

Of course I don't think you need to attract Italian or European hackers at all, but just to share this difference.
What's Xobni all about? Using Bayesian inference to categorize the importance of emails?
This looks extremely promising. Using Ajax functionality without actually using Ajax by compiling from Java into Javascript, and then having all of the user state on the client side without the need for a session object on the server. Wow. Now we just need the compiler for Lisp into javascript :)
Common Lisp to Java Translation
Now with Google's Web Toolkit and some unfortunates such as myself who only know Lisp (and some Basic), maybe the approach of translating from Lisp into Java is the way to go instead of trying to learn Java. (Having a partner who knows Java well is a good thing however)
Plans? We don't need no stinkin' plans (particularly not a time-phased one).

Seriously: Marketing success (like software development success) seems to be highly correlated with getting something out there and iterating as frequently as possible based on feedback.

Writing a plan is fine (if that floats your boat), but it often creates the delusion that you can actually control and predict how things are going to go.
A Plan For Startup "Spam"
We all know that most successful startups got started by "spamming". Not everyone is a Google. For eg. Facebook spammed the Harvard mailing list. Youtube spammed Craiglist for hot girls to post on their site. Tagged got big fast by "spamming" too. See http://www.istokpavlovic.com/blog/?p=5

I'm sure many of plaxo's competitors would love to be in their shoes when everyone start cursing them. At least it's better than being ignored.

Now, given a choice, for your startup, would you spam? If yes, how do you handle the backlash? Ignore it?

As for myself, I think it is best to "spam". If I spam, i can grow more than twice as fast at the expense of the fury of maybe 10% of those spammed. But when those angry people started cursing you, you start to doubt whether what you do is right. But if you don't spam, there is a likelihood that you don't get the critical mass fast enough to fend off a future challenger.
Ah, so Ikea desks are cool. I thought they were bragging about how informal the environment is (they follow up with 'shoes optional, sunglasses required'). At least in northern Europe, Ikea is cheap furniture that you have to assemble yourself. It has a nice clean, simple, light feel to it.

I think what they really mean when they show the Aerons, several screens, etc. is that the place is run by techies, or people empathetic to them. There is the latent message that if they can afford expensive props and are willing to spend on them, the financial conditions of your work there can be good. The colorful walls and free drinks tell a story about joy and playfulness. Of course your coworkers will be smiling and wearing sunglasses all the time, while sharing exhilarating and mind-expanding design discussions on the whiteboard! ;)

I don't think they expect to convince you with this stuff; just to pique your interest and make you want to learn more.
In Italy Ikea is very cheap _but_ considered cool. The smart single living in Milano will have ikea furniture, and so on.

About Aerons and several screens, again this does not match the EU hacker, that mostly uses a single screen (Quake players have mulitple ones), a common chair, but instead vim/emacs, fvwm2 or other high-productivity window manager and so on. Again a cultural mismatch, I don't want to say it's bad, just this message is not going to work outside the US.

Just pique your interest, ok, but if what they are looking for are real smart people they should know that this kind of advertising will hardly work. It's much better to talk about technology, freedom in the hour you should reach the office in the morning, $/cost of the life there, ...
I agree. Free drinks are basically worthless--to the point of it seeming like a desperate come-on. Free food just means, "You are expected to stay here for lunch and talk business." The big questions are:

1. Money, benefits, vacation.

2. Do I get an office?

3. How much time do I spend fixing other people's bugs?
If you manage to jott down 10 ways to market your idea and have a timeline i think its a good idea. everyone knows you cannot predict what is going to happen but that doesnt mean u cannot plan for the future.
I second the motion for laziness; joining #news.yc on freenode.
I think "spam" in the sense of "creative advertising" like posting on Craigslist, posting to at least quasi-relevant mailing lists, etc is fine. Spam in the sense of unsolicited email and posting to unrelated sites (e.g. teenwag on news.yc) is absolutely evil and not OK. There's a fine line between evil spam and creative advertising, but as Justice Potter Stewart said in Miller v. California: "I know it when I see it".
sunglasses?
I applied to YC with an answer to this question...
Whoa, Youtube did what? Link me to that story!
Don't be Facebook or Youtube :-) Be ONEList: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=23937