skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think PG mentions this in one of his articles, but if you read 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', get the original edition from the 1930s. It only costs 3 bucks or so on Amazon, and it's better than the newer ones. I highly recommend this book - it can be a true revelation for us technical types.
Extremely important: while they are spending their parents money on college, and meeting new people, it enables them to start their startup. Bottomline, they have the funding and the team, perfect start.
This is of relevance:

Haifeng Yu, Michael Kaminsky, Phillip B. Gibbons, and Abraham Flaxman, "SybilGuard: Defending Against Sybil Attacks via Social Networks." Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM Conference , September 2006

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~yhf/sybilguard-sigcomm06.pdf

In effect, this paper provides a way of "scaling" a trusted social network and minimizing the influence of sock-puppet accounts.
Excellent. It's unfortunate that it's computationally impractical.
Take a Break. No seriously. Free yourself for 1 hour.
Then come back more energized and ready to Rock and Roll
i've heard that the code at most major websites is held together by bubble gum and shoelaces. looks about right.
There is plenty of research into this, try a search on ACM [http://portal.acm.org/] or google scholar for 'trust reputation recommendation network'.

Reddit could/should have been using this kind of approach for ages (I don't know if they have or not).
Smartphone Browser Shootout: Palm, BlackBerry, HTC Vs. iPhone
Anyone having success charging for something on Facebook?
Also are there any numbers on how much money Facebook makes off the 'gifts' they sell?

I'm trying to decide right now between the prospect of charging a minimal fee for something and necessarily limiting my audience vs offering the service for free and attempting to make money off a large(r) audience with ads. I guess it is a question that most startups end up asking.

Does it seem like Facebook users are willing to spend money?
just try it - and see what happens. Best way to answer the question.
Of course. Although if someone has rejected your application/service once due to cost, it can be difficult to get a second chance, even if it is free at that point.
This has been done a lot of times before... one of the simplest examples is Advogato trust metric.

http://www.advogato.org/trust-metric.html
Isn't this is what Silicon Valley and Web 2.0 all about? (Although it is not part of Web 2.0) Amazon is more or less like this. Yahoo perhaps might be like this too. Your first product might be like this too.
Just out of curiosity, how much of a literature search are YC startups expected to do? In particular, how much of a literature search did reddit do?
MySpace? What's that?

;-)
Five Suggestions to Improve PodTech
Apple Gets Into Social Music Scene with My iTunes
Coding Horror: The Large Display Paradox
I haven't learned much in college that relates to entrepreneurship, but I've met the people who are starting a start-up with me.
I find using Expose and active screen corners in OS X on a 1440 X 960 screen and a single desktop allows me to work easily. I never minimize. I also use Quicksilver, which makes things that much easier to get at. More real estate would be nice for programming, but I wouldn't use anything larger than a 24" display; after that point there's too much eye and head movement.
Micropayments may be an option; makes it feel like it costs almost nothing, yet is many times more profitable than ads. Kinda like they get you to impulse buy a candy bar at the supermarket checkout line.
I just redid my site using blueprint, and it's great. The layout is more robust (I'm not a css wizard), and overall browser consistency has improved. It was also very easy to use.
What about selling it and letting the buyer worry about how to make money?
YC Demo Day on a Microsoft Site
Y Combinator held its Demo Day in Boston unveiling 19 new startups to VCs and investors. The event was hosted by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston.
Academic work is hard to translate into a good implementation though. For example, if you trust one user more than another user, that means that you would see totally different karma point values than any other user sees. That sounds really expensive to compute.
Advantages of an East Coast startup, Part 1
Much has been written recently about the differences between the entrepreneurial environment on the East Coast (Boston/New York etc) versus the West Coast (Silicon Valley). I've lived on both coasts, and worked in the tech industry on both coasts. And now I'm starting a company here in Boston. I think that gives me enough knowledge to write some intelligent things on the subject.
Rats, My Startup Just Got Googled!!
The consumer in me says: "I love Google!". I really can't think of any company which has given me so much cool stuff without me taking out my wallet!

The entrepreneur in me (a sometimes small, sometimes loud voice) looks at Google with a mixture of fear and envy. Why? Well, imagine you have poured your heart and soul into a startup project over months or years, to find out Google has launched a similar service for free just as your project is gaining traction! This is the stuff that makes people jump of bridges or tall buildings.
Your Good Idea Doesn't Matter
The worst is http://www.google.com/transit.

They released a beta that works for a small list of cities. Years later there is still no released progress and in my opinion its killed a lot of competitors.

Its a great, though obvious idea. Local bus systems have the worst and least helpful web sites ever. A simpler global app would be invaluable. Except no one makes it because who would go out and start a mobile "When will my bus come to this stop" application with the probability of google transit launching at any moment? No one, and so a lot of innovation has been held back.

I get angry about that every time I sit at a bus stop. :)
The loss of context on Facebook
Good list of books here. What else do you think should be added?

I would add Magic Ink (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/). Although not a print book it is a great guide to creating good information software.
i agree with you to an extent, but one part of me says that if somebody really has the guts, (s)he can just go ahead, and do such a good job of it that google _has_ to acquire it. clearly, it's something a lot of people need.
I think it was huge, but it totally depends on the person. If you're thinking you already know how to hack and can figure out business so college would be a waste then just don't do a comp sci major.

I've been programming since i was 12. I knew I was blowing 4 years and 100k on an education and I wasn't going to waste it sitting around watching my classmates learn how to program. I did Physics and EE instead of CompSci. It made me work incredibly hard and learn an insane amount of stuff. Combined with excellent internships it changes your work ethics and matures you considerably.

I mostly program now, barely use EE and never use physics but it was incredibly worth it.

Just don't lose the entrepreneurial spirit and promise yourself that you'll turn down all jobs offers, no matter how awesome or cushy, when you graduate :).
My point is:
Can you do it better than Google?
I think that in many cases the answer is...
Yes!
I got a lot of ideas from Katty Sierra's Creating Passionate Users.
(http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/)
This is a MUST read for me.
Good luck.
I imagine there are loads of variations on this theme (i.e. trust networks) that could produce useful recommendations, without the need for unwieldy computation. Sure there'll be a lot of number crunching, its just a matter of choosing the right ones to crunch, and when and how to crunch them.

Also, I'm just talking about delivering a good set of recommendations, anything else is gravy.
We need better web browser history. Here's why and how
Every startup team should read this (in my opinion)
I got a lot of ideas from this blog, it's so bad Katty isn't posting anymore, but I keep reading old posts.

What do you think?
How Not To Get Noticed: Design and Usability lessons from WordPress
5 Tips for Organizing Your CSS
GroopVine.com - Like the name? and should I sell it?
Several months ago, I registered the domain name groopvine.com in hopes of starting a project, one I submitted to yc. However, with studying for my MCATS (which are a week away), other duties, and a general change of ideas, I haven't really done much with it. I received an email several days ago from someone offering me $500 for it. I've grown a bit of an attachment with the name, and am having some trouble parting ways with it.

Do you guys think it's a name worth keeping and a good name in general? Or is it just another string of letters and $500 is slammin' deal?
Right, but this sounds like a "Beat your head through a concrete wall" sort of problem. Sure, you might be able to do it.. But.. Why? Is the value add really that big?
Have You Fallen for these 7 Negative Attitudes Pushed by the Media?
TechCrunch on Facebook Source Code Leak
There's no rule about it. It's good to know what you're talking about.
If you can do better than Google, could you market it better? It seems like the best way to compete with the big guys is to stay out of their way until you've built a solid base.
Google _does_ have competitors with deep pockets. The post mentions being nimble. You don't necessarily have to be more nimble than google -- just the competitors in the market that would do better to buy you than build their own.

But M&A frenzy shouldn't gloss over the need for a way to monetize a product. If you're building a good user base, and have a way to make money, you're in good shape no matter what Google does...

... maybe.
see? if your code does something useful, it doesn't matter how poorly factored it is, or if you use a language where > 40% of the community are total retards.
It depends on the context you are using it in! For social news (e.g. reddit et al.), this sort of thing might be a great help at providing personal recommendations.

Here is a fun recent paper from google, about 'Scalable Online Collaborative Filtering' for their personalised news service [http://www2007.org/paper570.php], using MapReduce to run Expectation Maximization. via [http://www.datawrangling.com/google-paper-on-parallel-em-alg...]
$500 for "groopvine.com"? I say sell.
Oddly enough, Google transit hasn't stopped the government. I use nextmuni.com nearly every day, and it's a life-saver. How did I ever use public transit without it? If even the government can compete in this area, a small startup could wipe the floor with both of them.
I don't understand. Is this seriously a big deal, as in this-might-impact-Facebook-somehow big deal? At first I thought "Okay, home page source code leaked. So what? It's a little ugly, but whatever".. Now I'm not so sure. Everyone's taking this and running with it. Maybe this just happens when you're the underdog.

I guess my real question is, who cares, and why? Not antagonistic, just honestly curious.
Sharp,

Meant no disrespect to the post, like I said before about 94 percent seem to be good. I am just suffering from a case of google fatigue and am tired of hearing/reading about that company.

You are right, as an outsider it probably would be good to read about eboys. I just think that the VCs during that era don't deserve much veneration or ink because they just seemed to pump money into almost any half-baked idea.

I have been sort of schizophrenic in my reading habits lately, trying to make it through "The Road To Reality" (Penrose), Foundation (Rand), and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer). I also intend to read most of the books on the list you posted.
you are right. nobody _should_ care. but anything involving facebook is news. pointless sensationalization.
The thing is, people love integration. Just look at MS Live Spaces. A lot of "common" (as opposed of Silicon Valley bloggers) are using it.

Google can integrate theirs, you can't.
Holy owned subsidiary, Batman!
Yeah, sell it. If a product is good, it doesn't matter what it's called if it's sufficiently simple to remember, and there are still a few of those domains out there.
I guess we have to define "care". I'm saying that Google didn't care enough about Altavista's technology to let it stop them from trying to out-do it.
How are posts rated by this thing? How can I customize AideRSS's output to my own tastes?

Is this site just a canned RSS remix per site, done semi-manually (I can't add arbitrary RSS feeds, hmmm)?
BTW, that sourcecode is totally useless. It's just a bunch of includes.
loudr.com: anyone interested in this domain?
I think it'd be a great domain name for a music app. If you have a good idea that this would be perfect for, email me at plusbryan (att) gmail.com. YC companies preferred.
I made the Fido lady cry: fanatical support in a bureaucracy
Encouraging more girls to pursue tech
Visiting TechStars - The Lessons
Typical Tech Entrepreneur?
VMware readying for biggest tech IPO since Google
Strategy by Design
Audio + Slides = SlideCasting!
"... Prototyping is simultaneously an evaluative process -- it generates feedback and enables you to make midflight corrections -- and a storytelling process. It's a way of visually and viscerally describing your strategy ..."

Heard this message before. Prototypes allow a "premortem" of a future product.
Clearly they should have implemented an object oriented relational database mapping includer mechanism instead of using simple include statements. Just ask anyone.
The problem with giving someone a default high score based on what they've done in the past is it devolves into a type of "appeal to authority" fallacy where deference is because of who someone is, as opposed to what someone is now saying. Trivial, offhand remarks by an authority figure are given greater weight than insightful, useful posts by an unknown. Even worse, out-and-out mistakes by the highly karmic come with an official stamp of karmic approval -- the whole system is prejudicial by design.

If your goal is to create a system that reflects people's typical judgement, then this works, because people make all sorts of logical errors. If, however, you are aiming for a meritocracy, judging each post on its own worth without regard to who said it (except when identity is actually applicable), the correct approach is to have a swarm of AIs reading everything and assigning points based on content. [1]

[1] Implementing the correct approach is left as an exercise for the reader.
I think his point was that it's not really very much of the functional code. It's basically the little piece that pulls in whatever's appropriate for each page. The libraries might have 50k LOC while the individual pages are a few dozen lines.
Might as well ask for $750...
sell!
'groopvine.com' isn't very valuable unless you have 'groupvine.com', too. Sell!
Learning from Facebook: Preventing PHP Leakage
SEO Speak Translated: The Real SEO Glossary
yeah, but how many are aligned flush with the side of the screen? it can't even be one pixel away for it to be super-usable.
There is a minor gem here; some function called 'tpl_set' which appears to inject values directly into templates that will be called later.
facebook > facebook source code
I'd read a subset of the list (say 5-8), and try building a startup. After all, you learn the lessons so much better if you learn it from doing.The 5-8 books give you an idea of what lies ahead.
look at Zenter then
Password Standify?
Just curious, what does it mean? It is not in the dictionary, and neither is groupvine. I have no idea what it could stand for.
Just don't use PHP...
Not everybody wants to use Google. I am more than willing to look into competing products and chose them over Google if they are better.

A lot of people will choose the competition simply because the competition to Google is the underdog, and people often sympathize with the underdog.
I agree. The "threat" from Google is highly overrated. Gmail didn't kill their competitors. Nerds use it, but most users still uses Hotmail or Yahoo mail.

The same can be said for "Froogle". This is a search engine from the world's most popular search engine company, but their competitors are still very much alive (and provides a better product).

Youtube was far more popular Google's alternative video service, so they forced Google to buy them

If you have an idea you shouldn't worry about Google. The real threat comes when Google buys one of your better competitors, then you might begin to worry.
Most of the "marketing" is done by tech people blogging about the new product, and other tech people read it and thinks that everyone uses it.

I would think that Gmail is the perfect example of this. I read about it all the time, but that's because I read slashdot, digg, reddit and other sites that most people don't read.

Even people studying computer science don't know about Gmail and has to be told that there is an alternative mail service. I bet that most of Facebook's users don't use Gmail or don't see the point when they have Hotmail.
I and my cofounder used the same idea of users as nodes of a graph for http://oknotizie.alice.it (a system similar to reddit for italian speaking users) in order to indentify groups of spammers and users with very strange behaviour. This information is used in order to decrease the weight of votes in the system for this bad users.

Our experience is that while this works very well against spam it does not stop the quality degradation that happens every time the community gets larger because the most active users tend to become friends and stop voting the news just for their quality.
What you say is true for comments, I agree that every contribution should be judged on its own merit. For filtering/ordering submissions though, such as on the reco-page on reddit, a web of trust is quite natural. Since we have limited time, we can't possibly read everything, so we might as well prefer content from people we trust. Same thing in real life, when you read the next book of your favorite author, instead of one by a complete stranger. If the scores are distributed, the authority figures aren't necessarily the same for everyone.
That isn't always an option (truth be told it isn't an option many people have).
How to get Your Big Idea into Build
I think I speak for everyone here apart from two people when I ask: what on Earth is this about?
"Bill Gates in particular is known as an avid bookworm - every other year, he spends a week doing nothing but reading, often for 18 hours a day."

how many weeks do you think he took off to read while microsoft was still a startup?
How much equity for investors and employees?
My boss has been complaining about this for at least a year. He's said, on multiple occasions, that this would be a profitable market for a startup to go into.

My reason for not going into it has nothing to do with Google: it's that a.) I don't want to deal with dozens of municipal goverments and b.) if some bureaucrat decides he wants to expand his turf, I could find myself competing with the government. Now there's a monopoly - with the power to tax and the lack of accountability to shareholders, governments can waste far more money than Google.

It sounds like a good business for an older entrepreneur though, preferably someone with local government experience.
in my opinion, i will suggest mysql, its free, opensource, the list goes on.......
i will like to ask if there are any african hackers who visit yombinator.com? if not then i guess that i am the only one?
You paid 10 dollars, right? You know how to do math, right?
Web Innovators Group: Boston Startups Come Out & Present
REJECTED: Microsoft's Open XML standard - TvByDemand | Forums | Microsoft
TextQuick makes texting your friends really quick!
I don't mean to be rude about it, but groopvine.com is a terrible domain name, imo. If someone wants to pay you $500 for it, sell it.
You aren't going to work productively on your startup for every waking hour of every day anyway. So why not use some of the unproductive time to be productive in a different way, by reading and expanding your mind?
Ending in an abbreviated err is getting tired. So is domain squatting, but maybe you actually want to use it.
"Modern entrepreneurship, especially web entrepreneurship, is extremely competitive / time sensitive, requires enormous amounts of iteration even within a single product life-cycle, and often requires solving many challenging technical and business problems one after the other in a public view (with the opposite sex watching)."

This doesn't make sense. Every web entrepreneur knows the opposite sex isn't watching.
Surprises on the Bookshelves of CEOs
Correction: Time is on your side, IF what you're building is inherently better than what the competition is building. In the long run, valuations approach inherent value; in the short term, valuations reflect market sentiment and irrational factors.

If, on the other hand, you're building yet another web 2.0 site, and the only thing distinguishing you from the competition is that you're YC-funded and have a cool name, eventually the market is going to realize that you have no clothes -- so you should either sell out as soon as possible or work hard on building something which is superior to the competition for reasons other than coolness. Google became popular because it was cool; but it stayed popular because it was technically superior to the competition.
Or use PHP for its original purpose: as a templating language.
i can only dream
Nice list. I've read about 1/2 of them. But IMO, the best one to start with would be "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis.
It's a decent domain name, but the $500 will do a lot more for your new startup than having a snazzy name. Just come up with another one.
Where is your startup? (for me Atlanta)
I was commenting about certain people saying that Facebook code is ugly and procedural and that they should have implemented object oriented naming conventions, or whatever else silliness they think needs to be done. Not trying to be mean to my friend nickb over there :)
I think I'm one of those people. So, why shouldn't they?
Mm.. Let's just agree to disagree. Going down this comment path would just incite something pointless.
Linux tool aims to cut systems' power use (save some money on server costs)
Hotel in space expected to open in a few years - TvByDemand | Forums | General
Heh, point taken :)
Valley Forge, PA; anyone near me? rokhayakebe, where in Atl? I grew up in East Cobb (Marietta).
Cool. I live in Marietta (vinings).
Articles should also be read and ranked based on content instead of by submitter. With books, you miss out on a lot by sticking with the same author, as there are so many other worthy books you never become aware of; people's usual habits can be improved upon.
The link is to Kathy Sierra's "people on the web are mean" (google can doubtless explain further) post, which is followed by a lot of her favorite pictures/graphs/bullet points about design/management/stuff. The latter are, presumably, the things every startup team should read. The story headline probably ought to have explained that, since the lead-in part is long, and its meaning obscure.
Old media targets the Facebook crowd
The same way desktop apps do: write it to disk.
The #1 reason your job sucks and how to fix it
Pligg, The Open Source Digg Clone, Put Up For Sale
Scrabulous, The Favorite Facebook App of Facebook Employees
As per zach, the state where you're operating is going to impose income/franchise taxes regardless.

I've heard of strategies that involve multiple entities. So for instance you might form a Nevada entity that owns the IP and licenses it to the operating entity. The licensing/royalty fees serve to shift a fraction of your income out of state where it can't be taxed.

That's all I know. For us it'd be way too much hassle just to avoid (some of) the ~4% franchise tax.