skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Transparent Recruiting
Pretty sure it's not "the MVP," but "an MVP," among thousands. This story is being overhyped to the max.
iRead - facebook app to track your books on your facebook profile
Just curious how you got 1000 users already. What type of marketing did you do?
Note to the author of this blog: Your site disables the back button, and I hate that.
A small startup is going to find something better to do with five grand. A millionaire is going to cover his ass.

Honestly, I don't know why he even bothered to make a post explaining what he did.
He says: "Lawyers are like oil filters: You can pay now or you can pay later."

Yes, but lazy evaluation seems better in this case, because "later" doesn't always happen for startups. Why pay unless you know you need it?
If I'm not mistaken, this is the "coasian solution" for the provisioning of public goods:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Coasian_solution

I recall this being discussed on the FSB (Free software business) mailing list a number of years ago. It's one of those ideas that seems good, but doesn't seem to work out in practice. Maybe all it will take is the right tweak or two to make it functional?
Mac OS Becoming Juicier Target for Virus Writers
Why there's no Rails Inc
So you don't see any difference, for example, between the maps 1.0 (mapquest) and Google maps? They are both "maps", but other than that there is a world of difference. The same thing goes for any other product that has gotten substantially more useful.
Very cool UI for a desktop
How Craig Newmark Built Craigslist With "No Vision Whatsoever"
Mark Fletcher said something similar after he sold his first startup. These guys should just realize they're in a different position than a lot of founders, because they have assets to risk.
I emailed him and asked him to. (Well, others asked too.) We hear the same message from experienced investors over and over: "don't skimp on the legal fees." Since newbie entrepreneurs tend to disagree about this, I wanted to hear more about why they give out this advice.
Theories are ultimately validated through experimentation and observation. For "intelligence", that means coding it up, and see if it learns anything. That doesn't sound very different to me from "funding teams to code up someone's personal AGI hypothesis".
That's a MS screw-up, not an argument against using proprietary platforms. God knows how many web site owners Google could sue if it applied its Adsense TOS to the letter, but they know better than doing that.
Marc Andreessen: Why we're not in a Bubble
I feel the "platform independence" makes a huge difference, though. I develop on a windows machine, and I can just deploy the binaries on the Linux-Server. I don't have any version headaches for deploying on various platforms. Maybe that is just a small thing and no big deal for make-wizards, but for me it is enough to avoid other settings like the plague. I ran into problems like that when I tried Ruby, btw. It seems there are different versions for Windows which are not compatible with each other (ie Cygwin version or Visual C++ version).
"Facebook has 24 million active users (meaning theyve used the site in the last 30 daysI like how they arent overstating numbers like SecondLife) and 50% of them login each day. Mark says the next most active social network is not more than 15%."

However, the internet has several billion users, and 90% of them log on every day (I made those numbers up, but you get the idea). So where is the difference to Facebook? Just because somebody is using Facebook doesn't guarantee that they are using your Facebook plugin. And once there are as many plugins as there are services on the internet as a whole, I don't see an additional advantage for Facebook...

Just playing devils advocate, it just seems to me some people are being blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes. Sure, it would be nice to write a plugin that every facebook users uses, but in general it won't be so easy.

There is probably a bonus for being an early starter now, though.
Wall St. Journal's new tech news site "run autonomously as a small online startup"
Still has a pretty old-media feel to it. If this were a YC startup I'd advise them to get the giant pictures of themselves off the frontpage and put enticing stories there instead.

But it does cure the number 1 problem with the WSJ, which is that you can't read their articles without paying. That alone makes this site newsworthy, because the WSJ were among the last holdouts in that dept. But restricting their articles to subscribers was making them increasingly irrelevant; when was the last time you saw a WSJ article on Reddit or Digg or Slashdot? Now they've decided to work like the rest of the Web.

What next? Will we one day be able to read NYT articles without having to register?
Where can you get a (cheap or free) digital certificate (for Code Signing jar files)?
Thawte wants to charge me $249 just to renew - I paid $50 for the certificate last year.

I heard you can get them free from CA Authority but when I looked it up, they have some procedure where you have to know someone who is a CA and attend their events, (which are mostly in Europe or California).
Sounds good. One question: how do you pick the developer? Or will it just be a competition, whoever delivers first gets the money?
I think the cheapest ones are from comodo.com , $179.
Too much clutter. I would rather them drop all the glossy stuff and give me the content I crave. All the pictures I pretty much block out because they remind me of advertising.

That's why I much prefer news.YC and reddit format to NYT; less annoyances.
Amp'd Mobile in Bankruptcy b/c kids haven't paid their bills!
that is ridiculous. all they are doing is calling you up to verify you are from where you say you are, and doing a quick lookup. At the time of purchase.

After that, it is just the certificate file.
Well, when IE 6 and Vista first came about a couple of years ago, I could not find code-signing certificates listed anywhere except comodo.com and verisign.com. They are being offered in more places now, but also for a lot more money. It's $500 for 3 years from comodo.com--that's only a savings of about twenty dollars a year. I believe multi-year savings used to be much more substantial before. Yet more reasons to create web applications.
I think they will this year; they recently announced they will 'lower' editorial standards to get their stories on the Internet faster. Right now, their Internet standards are the same as those of the print newspaper, so they are just as slow.

However, there is nothing wrong with charging money and controlling access to your content. Reporters need to be paid. I think the NYT is doing the right thing--likely, waiting until they have their own reddit clone or google news.
Sure it is a screw-up, but if you don't use a proprietary platform, that screw-up can not happen.
For me this 5000 would directly translate into fewer resources going into creating the product. I think I'll pass.
This is one place where cheapest may not be best.

We went through a similar thing a few years back with SSL certificates.

GoDaddy offered super-cheap (relatively speaking) certs, but none of the major browsers had GoDaddy in their default list of certification entities at that time.

So the upshot of using a GoDaddy cert was that every visitor would get a "not trusted" warning, even though the cert was legitimate.

That's not something you want your users to see when they're in the middle of signing up or downloading something from your site.

I don't know whether or not this concept applies to java & jar too, but you might want to confirm it before making a decision.
Your Startup (digital media) as a rock band
The Statistics Behind Digg Submissions
There are other known examples of proprietary platform problems (e.g. the Linux/BitKeeper debacle; abandoned products by Borland, Microsoft and others leaving developers alone in the middle of the desert)

Proprietary software is inherently bad for practical reasons, not just for philosophical/idealistic reasons.

Now, I'm not saying software developers should not make a living (I'm one myself). It's just that we didn't solve the problem of getting income from open source yet (as far as I'm concerned, the service model of Red Hat, IBM and others is irrelevant).
"The best frameworks are in my opinion extracted, not envisioned. And the best way to extract is first to actually do."

so true
Dangers of Moonlighting II
When it came to search, the butler didn't do it / So Ask.com has done away with Jeeves
This sounds like a startup opportunity - issue cheap but trusted certificates.
Die, PR, die, or raise your game and learn about asynchronicity (Technology Editor of the Guardian)
Hosting Web 2.0 Applications Yourself
Bringing public Wi-Fi to small-town America
Yeah, it's like Pink Floyd, their song became exactly what it was about: "Money". And I heard this from Gilmour on an interview.
Internet conduct that crosses the state line?
Google acquires programming toolmaker PeakStream (multi-core processor tools)
Shared interest is sufficient for a lot of projects (e.g. format converters, small plugins, bug fixes, performance improvements, support for a certain standard/protocol, driver support, port to another platform, etc.)

It wouldn't work for a full-featured 3D modeler or a video game, of course.
French sports groups join suit against YouTube
Google Earth users outnumber Brazil's population
Do Venture Investors Require Business Plans?
How accurate is this? Do those in the valley see the same requirements?
My favorite analogy of being a Microsoft developer comes from this article:

http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Editorial/wjs_Windows.html

"Lots of small programmers have a vision that working with Microsoft is like being one of those little toothbrush birds for crocodiles - sure, the crocodile is the one eating the zebras and gazelles, but there's plenty of crumbs left in the cracks between his teeth. The crocodiles don't hurt the birds, as they appreciate clean teeth, and the tiny birds can live very well off the morsels that the 20-foot crocodile deems not worth bothering with, so everybody wins.

The problem with this analogy is toothbrush birds never grow up to be crocodiles - they spend their whole lives just living off the gunk in crocodile's teeth."
I could recommend my soon to be published book "How to finish reading 'Getting Things Done'". If only I would finish writing it one of these days...
Any ideas for avoiding the login, though? It seems to me the prevalent reason for requiring it is to be able to ban users that write inappropiate things in your forums, for example?
If 500 people are willing to pay $10 for a piece of software, a developer has two options: 1. Make it on your site for $5000 (minus your cut) and feel good about themselves; 2. Make it themselves, sell it on the web for $10, and make much more money. So much for others' incentive to produce your product.
Also, what he said.
It's not inherently bad. There are trade-offs. Yes, proprietary software carries increased legal risks. OTOH, it is often better precisely because there is more incentive to build it than to build OSS.
"Every single idea is derivative. Many successful products are simply about taking something that exists and then changing its focus or its look."

Yyyyyyes...but understand that Truemors is rather more "derivative" than, say, the iPod or Windows 3.11.
New York Times versus Digg
Google acquires peakstream
So... he's basically saying that "there is no Rails Inc" because of two reasons:

1. If he does go full time Rails, it's not going to be the "best".
2. If he does it, it will be "unfair" to competitors.

In my opinion it's a bunch of BS. Because there is already "Rails Inc" and it's called 37 signals. Rails is their most valuable product. They are making money on it, riding all the positive Rails PR, promoting the hell out of their relatively weak offerings (basecamp, ta-da lists). Very similar to how Joel makes money on his "Joel on Software" blog.
Perhaps what he means is that the "ecosystem" is a pretty level playing field right now. Since 37 signals conspicuously does not do rails development, service or support, anyone can jump in and play in that space.
Here the common answer I find: Feasibility study
A formal document presenting an overview of your business can help you recruit potential partners, investors or lenders. It should detail the following aspects of your business:
-- The product or service: What are its unique features?
-- The management team: Does your team have experience in the industry?
-- The market: Who are the target customers? How big is the potential market? What are the costs required to reach the target market?
-- The competition: Who are your major competitors? Is your product or service superior to the competition?
-- The costs: What will it cost to start and run your business?
Don't rely on credit cards
Credit cards are a tempting but expensive source of capital for starting a business. If you resort to them for cash, your business plan should include a schedule for paying back that money within a year or so.
Too bad the article doesn't state the numbers of immigrants/businesses started. Also, I guess immigrants will typically have more money than an average person, so starting a business might be slightly easier.
I wonder what's the percentage of code that 37signals produces that goes into Rails itself, and how does it compare to their actual applications. I bet it's something like 9 to 1.

Don't get me wrong, I love Rails and thank you, 37signals, But let's not distort the reality: Rails is their biggest cash cow they are milking, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
For what it's worth, IDE's make java far less painful in a way an IDE could never help a dynamically typed language.

I used mostly python or other scripting languages before taking a primarily java-based job. At first I was fearful, but then I got a taste of what an IDE can do to Java.

Sure you have lots of libraries to call, and lots of mundane code to write, but the IDE is able to a) give you your options and b) autowrite the mundane code c) catch most errors before you compile thanks to tight syntax and (almost) strong typing

It can also save a lot of time over python which is prone to introduce program halting errors without any compile time notification. This is especially annoying if you have programs with a long runtime.

In the end, its just another tool in the bag.
People tried this approach many times: mimicking the real world, even in 3D, while trying to organize information better on the computer.

The problem is that in real world things get messy. That is why we started using computers to begin with! :-)
They are - I wouldn't expect any founder to take a $200k salary pre-dilution. Squares with the other article on news.YC (forgot the title...) about how a typical VC expects the founders to own 3-10% of the company at a liquidity event.

One thing I don't understand: why does any software startup take VC? 10% of $200M = 100% of $20M, but you're much more likely to find a buyer for the $20M two-guys-in-a-garage startup than the $200M startup with 2 dozen employees. It seems like VC doesn't increase your best-case outcome at all, but significantly decreases the chance that you'll reach your best-case outcome.
What is value proposition? Does your startup has good value proposition? How to measure it? :)
How can you compare NYT with Digg or Reddit? NYT produce content, while Digg&Reddit produce nothing, just trying to make money on what NYT does.

One can possibly compare NYT with a bunch of bloggers, they are also content producers, but not with Digg/Reddit who produce nothing.
A great logo doesn't mean anything until the brand makes it worth something
I'm sure that once you got deep into, you'd probably find banking software pretty difficult. Since it has to work. All the time. 100%. No compromises. That sounds pretty hard.
Creating MyTube with Flex and PHP
The major difference between Digg and NYTimes is that Digg is a democratic news website, in contrary to the NYTimes.

I agree, social bookmarking websites are different. Also, to be honest, I wouldn't call Digg a news website, I see very few newsworthy stories on Digg... it's more like a collection of cool links.
How can it be a cash cow when there is no direct revenue from it? Rails is fantastic advertising for their company but it's their products that make them money. Rails just brings awareness.
Bob Cringely's prediction on OOP and the Web in 1997
Feedback Learning for Entrepreneurs. Must read for Ycombers.
Don't you think it's actually a question of semi-chaos vs. order (OOP being the "order" side of it)?

Intergalactic Object Models will never rule this industry for the same reason as why Google Directory prooved to be useless and was removed from their front page lately.
I aggree with tx and Laurentvw, but (once again) Steve has missed the point. People who follow loads of links on digg and reddit are not high valued readers (maybe gullible enough to click on ads, but mostly college age geeks). He's on there because they are both a list of crap with catchy titles.

People who read the times are a much different reader. If he was in nyt and had something worthwhile, I'm sure he would have seen value from the article (although maybe not in the form of click throughs on his ads). Since he doesn't produce anything new or interesting, it isn't likely to happen though.
It's also useful to think of how business works in various fields in the physical world: you can find real opportunities for web startups or software to fill a need.

E.g. the real estate industry is huge and agents in particular earn large commissions = opportunity for Zillow, Trulia.
PHP Eats Rails for Breakfast
Google Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy, "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees"
Censorship 'changes face of net'
Very disorganized. I'll stick to `ls` thanks :P
It's worse in the mobile space.

If you're trying to sign a jar to go on handsets, you pretty much either have to go a thawte certificate ($200), or a verisign certificate ($400) in order to guarantee compatibility with most handsets that are out there.
On an unrelated note, these days GoDaddy SSL certificates are trusted by all the major browsers.
I agree with this completely. I had a similiar idea to this company a few months ago, but only for fixing bugs. I called it "Bug Bounty". I even wrote up a business plan. In the end the financials just didn't work out. I'd have to have 1000s of bug bounties being created every day to make a few million dollars a year. It's discouraging to determine that even if everyone used your product, you'd still have a pretty small company.

If anyone is interested in seeing the business plan, just shoot me an email gregpinero at gmail.com
It worked for Mark Shuttleworth during (before) the first boom. It could work for you, too!

There's a lot of competition out there these days, and the cost/time of getting accepted by all of the browsers put your time to revenues sometime two or three years into the future. In other words, it's a hard business to get into to, and you'll probably need a source of revenue while you wait. That's why folks who sell domains are getting into the business...they have some revenues from the domain business for those two or three years, and then they have a large customer base to sell the certs to.
Same experience here. The power of Java is more apparent in larger projects where the rigid policies (ex: no multiple inheritance) and strong typing maintain a high quality standard for code and minimize those nasty deeply seated bugs.

For hackers writing short programs quickly it seems like a pain but this rigidity pays off as things scale. Great IDE implementations (eclipse) really shine when they can utilize strong typing to warn of syntax, compile-time (and some logical) code faults while coding. In my experience catching these problems in the IDE yields a greater time savings in the long run (vs interpreted languages)..
There is some overlap. The voting mechanisms of news aggregators tend to discover interesting stuff, and that is also the purpose of some of the "content" in papers and magazines.
Building a general purpose 'human computer' using human computation games
Perhaps depressingly, much banking software doesn't work 100% of the time. Or at all, occasionally. I've worked on a few large financial apps, and the general quality level of the industry is pretty disturbing. They aren't architected much better than a good consumer webapp - more buzzwords, more heavyweight process, but the actual quality of the code isn't any better, nor is the developer's understanding of what they're doing.

I've noticed the same problem from a consumer's POV too. I was just on IM with a friend last night whose online banking account just stopped working for her. I can't log in online with my BankNorth account, and I get some weird error code whenever I try a "forget my password" or "reset my PIN". My dad notices that a couple cents disappear from his bank balance every month, and no matter how much he checks his arithmetic, there's no way to make it balance. Several people he's talked to have noticed the same thing.

I've heard that the industry used to be better, that people actually took "100% uptime" and "don't lose money" seriously before Java and Y2K and all these newfangled development practices. I knew a developer that was an early employee and later VP at Stratus, and she really did know her stuff. But she seems to be a dying breed - everything now is moving towards J2EE and outsourcing where nobody really takes responsibility for the quality of the software anymore.

Sometimes I think that all the top-notch engineers at Google and Facebook should quit their jobs and start financial software companies instead. Because they really are more highly skilled than the folks who build the software that manages your life-savings. Facebook manages 3 TB of data in memcached alone without a hitch - that's more than we have on disk at the financial software company I work for.
Local news stations to start putting video on YouTube
It's a bit of a different model... on this site, a designer can see what they can make and sell for $5000. That is, "write a program, make $5000". As opposed to "write a program, make a website, figure out a way for people to find out about it, wait for money to trickle in".
The website looks aesthetically pleasing, and the idea is very good, if implemented right. Even if it isn't the most original idea, that's not what matters. Something worth thinking about if you already haven't:

What, exactly, is an "idea"? Will the person first creating the project decide all of the specifications? What if there is an idea with $2000 pledged to it, and I have a very similar idea (but slightly different) and am willing to pledge $3000 more, but insist that it be different. Can people defect and re-pledge to my idea? Since I'd be providing the most money, would that give me power to change the specifications? Who is in control over making decisions like this in production?
What's your cookbook? - (37signals)
A Tale of Two Legal Paths - Particletree Inc. versus Infinity Box Inc. (Wufoo)
It's pretty awesome that Google has invented a magical machine for determining an employee's worth.
Aye, I'm curious where this magical employee vaule number comes from and how you can tell what it is before they've even worked for google!
You'd be surprised how much you can learn about a person's ability by interviewing people correctly.
There are a various underlying assumptions here which aren't necessarily true.

First, it's hard to measure candidate and employee quality on one single scale, with a standard deviation of only 15%.

Second, people you hire aren't always going to perform at the level of performance you estimated, independent of the project you put them on.

Third, your candidate pool won't always contain people who are smarter than the mean. I'm sure Google is now attracting the best and the brightest, but will the same be true 5 years from now?
Netscape Navigator 9.0 Released - The First Social Browser