skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't see it as a tool which can be compared easily. Eclipse (in my view) is more of a complete IDE. Same with Visual Studio (also superb).

Textmate is a seemingly minimalist programmer's editor. When you get into it and start hacking you start to see how much is really there. Definitely not an IDE though.
Flipping Web Fixer-Uppers
I totally agree. It makes them sound like they don't know what they're talking about. I also thought it was funny that now they're describing these amazing 'niches' that are being worked on when it's been happening for a real long time.
Indeed. Is it just me or are those two ugly buttons at the bottom completely superfluous? Couldn't they have just made the logos into links. It would've been so much nicer.
or if titles should be bigger w/less contrast. I like .title 11pt or 12pt and a:link less than black, maybe #222222 or so.
Compared to eclipse: Bloat.
I think greyed out links on the gray backround makes it harder. Why not use some of the orange for unread links?
The marriage metaphor, as JMiao put it, works well. When you're setting off to start a family with someone, you don't want any adverse surprises. The same goes with starting a company. And similarly, making foundation changes will be expensive as hell, in time and money.
This is pretty interesting. Of course, the big risk here is that "flipping" anything is entirely dependent on a hot market - like we have right now with web apps.

Should that market turn, you won't be able to flip as successfully as you could right now. Sounds like a great idea to raise funding, finance a large purchase, etc. etc.
Why does it matter if eclipse is huge? Your productivity is what's important. And for Java, eclipse results in a dramatic improvement in productivity.
Leveraging Emerging Technology, how one company found it's niche using .NET :\
They had 53K at the time of writing ;) That article is from nearly a year ago..

I think that that is part of the key to understanding why the 53K are targetted- Because anything they're talking about now has a good chance of making it big later on.

It's a risk, and it doesn't always (seldom?) pays out, but if I were to infer into the minds ofany dozens of developers, I'd think they're looking at the Techcrunch readers as the type of Early Adopters that they want/need to get them started- The type of people who are going to get excited about a product, to tell their friends.

These are the people who will spend a day trying new technologies, whereas most "normal" people only try it once a friend recommends it.
Those targeting the TC-crowd want to find that friend.

-Colin
Open Semantic Database
A cool way to generate hipe about your product
The web is evolving very fast these days. It seems to me that because of our connections and web browsing habits, people reading this are often disconnected from how "normal" people view the web. Let me assure you, this web 2.0 craze we are seeing is no bubble. What will happen? well, in a sense, web 2.0 is really interactive web 1.0. The future leaders of the social web will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of today's leaders: Google, Facebook, Myspace, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, and Craigslist. (technology increases exponentially: never forget this)

When a website incorporates all the positives of these types of websites into 1 all encompassing tool for organizing the unlimited information of the Internet, then we will see something great. We will see an evolution of these tools and it will not only be something people can use to get more efficiency out of life, it will actually improve people's lives and societies (globally).

If you think the effects social networks and human/computer interaction are amazing, wait until you see the children of these sites. It is *absolutely* not a coincidence that the founders of Reddit played WoW. They realize that power of a website is directly correlated to the amount of user input into a website. The dilemma we entrepreneurs are faced with today is creating systems that encourage maximum participation.

How does this tie into the 53,000 theory? None of the big winners, and I am talking the big ones, facebook, myspace, google, msnpages, orkut, (these are the sites that lead the world in user participation) succeeded because of blog recommendations. They succeeded because they were better ways of experiencing the Internet, not because some ÃÂexpertÃÂ on techcrunch told the geeks it was a cool product.

Well, there are many amazing "web 2.0" websites out there that will never be used by the masses until their friends, not techcrunch, invites them.

On the Internet, the best solution always win. Humans are economical; they do what is best for themselves. When we create a search/browsing tool that is at the same time more rewarding and fun than myspace/wikipedia/delicious/digg we will see the whole world adopt this method, the same way the world has adopted the Google search, the same way all the ÃÂcoolÃÂ people are on myspace. This website will not only be as "cool" and as fun, it will actually enhance people's lives.

This is the future of the web. It is also no coincidence that VC's like the one whom this post is referring to, have seen a lot of "like delicious but XXX" or "Digg killers" This is not just hype, one day it will happen. One day there will be a delicapedieddit that will emerge as the new Internet powerhouse.
Inspire Yourself: 58 Creative Logos
lol@"20 ways to make your cellphone look like Steve Jobs".

Digg users are indeed obsessed with lists. I once posted an article to Digg titled "9 Inventions Edison Did Not Make" along with "Anatomy of a successful social network". Both reached the frontpage; but the former received 500 more Diggs than the latter, eventhough I must've spent 20x more time writing "Anatomy of a successful social network".

Digg users have severe ADD; they like to consume information fast, and then get out of the site. Lists let them do just that.
I'd say there're two kinds of startups which are unknown to mainstream America. One is the kinds the general public have actually used, but just may not realize that is a service provided by a startup company. This includes the likes of Slide or Meebo, which many more people have put their widgets on their blogs/Myspace than going on to their proprietary website. These startups are fine; they may just need more PR to the mainstream media.

The startups that are really hard to reach mainstreams are those me-too startups, which are those "social network for XX" or "youtube cross wikipedia" kind of thing that users could not tell a slight difference from the sites that they have been using.
Here is a list of almost 1000 Web 2.0 logos: http://web2logo.com

Good post though :)
BarCampBoston2: An open unConference for technology & startups
A lot of VCs say they invest in the team. Then why do they often insert outsiders after they fund a startup?
interesting idea - I hope they add the ability to search by state and take out that puke green. Perhaps if we could get it in cornflower blue...
My guess is most of the time the VCs are nervous about the business or don't get along with the people they're replacing. They want to install blindly loyal and controllable "yes men" to feel secure.

Bringing in suits is still considered standard operating procedure. It's a shame how many mini-John Scully incidents (minus the happy ending) occur. ArsDigita is a famous example, and I imagine there have been hundreds of less dramatic and less public instances.

It does seem like there would be legitimate scenarios where replacing top people may be necessary. Most of the time I would regard it as a likely-fatal symptom of a serious condition.
It all boils down to this: when a VC invests money in a startup, they are putting their reputation on the line. So imposing some control over the startup just seems natural. Imagine if you had to trust $11 million on a group of strangers; installing one of their own on the startup's board gives them a birds eye view of how their money is being spent.
nPost.com Interview with Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn
LinkedIn's CEO Reid Hoffman Replaced By a VC Crony (02/4/07)
He claims to agree with the move, but considering the timing of that investment it seems unlikely the decision was his.

If he hasn't quit by '08 I will be surprised. Time to launch a LinkedIn competitor?
Does reading this raise your chances of success?
And vote THIS up if you want there to be user-configurable values via SQL injection exploits:

http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid="begin;update Skins set Font='Comic Sans' where userName='mynameishere';commit;"
Im kind of a startup person. I run a young company. Lately im reading the news here on a regular basis. Apart from being fun, i dont know if its of any use. What do you think? Did you ever learn something that had a positive impact on your business by reading stuff on the net? Is reading of any use? Or is it all about acting?
When I'm learning something new I tend to switch back and forth between practice and study. Neither alone seems foster growth as fast as the combination. I think working on your startup counts as practice and this site counts as studying.
Looking for Web-based Political News Infrastructure
Ok, you "learned tons". How much money did you make of it. Or by what measure was it valuable?

Maybe you *think* you learned something, while in fact you just spent time entertaining yourself?
I think the more interesting issue is that they're charging money for beta software.

(Of course, most things are more interesting than a Vi/Emacs/whatever holy war)
#2 is pretty helpful for me in terms of thinking about the problem. It seems really obvious now, but I tended to think of performance and usability as different buckets each to be optimized on their own. I just thought of better performance of an end to its own (faster stuff is JUST better, right?). Of course the reason performance is important is because it makes things more usable.
ctrl-scrollwheel
Like everything, it's a balance, right? All study and no practice is just as bad as all practice with no study. And sometimes, if you internalize something that you read, you won't often remember where you read it from, so you think you came up with it yourself.

That said, I think it's good to keep yourself in check, since we all probably are pretty voracious readers, and will keep reading, even if it's stuff we already know, just because it's a new article. My recent motto is to produce more than you consume (if it's quality stuff).
However, a 2003 vintage fund probably has had very few (if any) exits. I would like to understand what exactly the y-axis of this graph models, and how it accounts for performance. Is performance based on the value actually returned to investors (in which case, 2003 and newer funds would be expected to have little or zero return), or the current valuations?

There's very little I dislike more than graphs with unlabeled (or ambiguous) axes.
Internet Startup Company Links
Dan Bricklin's Log Podcast
Piece of cake.

Ok everybody, split into to equal groups. Now, group 2, you're going to have to stop reading. Check back in a year and we'll see which group does better.

Edit: On a less snarky note... I don't see how reading different viewpoints about startups could be a bad thing.
I like the site. I don't know if its a good place to think up ideas, or to even check if "somebody else is doing it" which doesn't really matter. It is a nice resource to quickly see stuff thats out there. Try to find some good in everything :)
Maybe. But maybe the opposite of all you said is true.

Balance might be not good to be "beating the averages". Practice to the extreme might be better. How do you know that balance is better?
or for Mac users: Shift-⌘+
That's kinda funny. I've always read that passage to mean, those are the types of armies you don't want to be fighting against, since the best victory is victory where you don't have to fight at all and the opposing side just gives up. I never thought of it as advice to put your own people in a corner, so they have no choice but to fight their way out. I suppose morale had better be high, or else instead of "Prepare for glory", one can "prepare for slaughter."
I love you, eli! You think like me.

But one would have to pay me to join the "stop reading" group =)
I know because I am consistently running up against real issues that involve things I've learned. It has been very helpful, even in the minimal case of providing a frame of reference for making decisions.
Digitized voice calls *are* data. So they might as well run over an IP network.
Everything you always wanted to know about mobile web, but were afraid to ask (PDF - Paul Fling's SXSW presentation)
Admittedly it's not quite the same without, ya know, the audio. But Paul knows his stuff. He also wrote the new Web Developers Best Practices Guide for dotMobi domains: http://www.blueflavor.com/blog/mobile/dotmobi_mobile_web_developers_guide.php
Agreed. Storing more email helps to target their ads, and most users will never use the full amount of space. Also, at the rate that storage gets cheaper they are able to continually increase the limits. It's like the problem that Amazon had with excess servers, they had so much infrastructure that they needed something else to do with it, to fix the problem they started the EC2 and S3 programs. Gmail could serve the same kind of purpose for Google.
Manager Tools - Helping you become a more effective manager and leader
It doesn't lower your changes..
Not true. Practicing incessantly will make you excellent in one category. Reading, learning and continually evolving will make you better across several.

I can stick my head in the sand and keep programming PHP, but thanks to the web and reading, I have an interest in design, AJAX, and most of all Ruby on Rails. You can choose to be insanely good at one thing, or just good at several. I'll take the latter since its more flexible.
Joe Kraus' emphasis on "make what you measure" convinced me to start measuring some specific metrics in more detail. The end result was boosted numbers in some of my performance/growth stats.

The most valuable things I've learned from other entrepreneurs are principles and methodologies. I apply them over and over again as I face specific issues.
How To Find Interesting Events In Your Area
Oh no. Don't let this be what keeps you in Windows land. Switch to Mac just because it's better in every way, you won't regret it.
Being excellent in one thing is often cited as a key factor to success. For example by Google:
www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html
"It's best to do one thing really, really well"

What insights do you have to proove the makers of the most successful tech startup wrong?
If the text looks grey on a grey background, you might be using firefox. The site is much more readable on IE. Not that you should have to change.
Guy said Garage is a $20 million fund. Other VCs do single deals for more than that. I think he's a straight shooter with upper VC stardom written all over him.

His interview with Venture Voice talked a lot about Garage and he was very candid:

http://www.venturevoice.com/2006/10/vv_show_39_guy_kawasaki_of_gar.html
Would Y Combinator frown upon your team if your members developed side projects for fun/hobby? Would it be considered lack of focus?
My team members enjoy creating things for the hell of it because it's fun. The application asked if we had built anything else. A lot of the things we are building is almost entering beta stage. I would say maybe 3 of the projects. We built it because it was fun to build.

We're concerned that Y combinator may think that we lack focused if we shared the projects on our applications. Should we or shouldn't we list the other projects we developed for fun?
Variety of ideas are indicative of the plasticity of mind. Rest assured, this is something YC will see as a good thing. Go ahead and list them.
How Last.FM began and how mashups made it possible
Ok, there we have a first example!
Well, it costs time, right?
I loved this article. It covers how a website can start with no clear vision and have the social community direct what it ultimately becomes

They also have a pretty positive outlook on their biggest competitor, Pandora, who they also see as a friend in spreading their products reach.
Raises your chances of success? Don't leave your success to chance. Hardwork and perserverance. Sure, a lil luck wouldn't hurt, but don't count on it.

As for this site, its fun to read. Keep a critical mind though, because there simply is no magic formula, no hard and fast rules. As Morpheus might say "The rules can be bent, sometimes broken".
I must say I was pleasantly surprised to find my startup profiled :) thx for the find msgbeepa
You can start a startup without chance of failure? How many did you do so far?
Well, this is a manifesto to do stuff. You give examples, how stuff can lead to other stuff. Thats fine. But its not specific to reading startupblogs, is it?
Reading opens your mind to new things. Just because you can't see the direct effect reading has on your thoughts doesn't mean it has no effect. It gives you better perspective so you can see things from a different point of view.

Reading has different values other than perspective as well, it gives you conversation capital so you can better relate to others.

Obviously for reading to be valuable in these ways you have to read the "right things." I tend to prefer books over blogs if I'm trying to learn something specific (but blogs are great for keeping up on current events and getting different perspectives than the mainstream media), because it gives you focus and a single thing to remember. How many blog posts can you remember from a month ago?
Frank Peters Show 100th episode; podcast interviews with entrepreneurs, VCs, etc.; more useful than an MBA!
People don't usually know what they want. It is your job to figure it out based on the available information and then give it to them.

Perhaps this would be useful to those ends; but I would not take what people say to be what they literally want.
I would say list them because it shows your team's ability to innovate. Besides, if Y doesn't like the one you submitted, they might like the other ones.

Cheers
Maybe the outsiders can add value to what your team lacks.
What's the cool way, "be 37 signals" ?
As long as the 53,651 are actually interested in using it, not just having a look or thinking about the startup behind it. I imagine thats the problem with traffic from places like techcrunch.
I had been using Komodo for the last few months which is a nice IDE, but this looks promising.

I've tarballed the latest bundles from their repository and renamed all ":?*\\|" characters to DOS friendly characters, if you want to try out a bundle that isn't included with E. You can grab it from: http://www.bigheadlabs.com/~jason/Bundles.tar.gz
Founders at Work p. 392 James Currier encourages you to lie to VCs!
Because you rarely have a full team.
"Well, of course you sometimes have to exaggerate. If you think there are three places where you can get a lease, then you just say you have a lease so you can move to the next step. You've got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at.

To move to step two, people have to believe that you're already at step two so there's no risk for them. Because they don't want to take on your risk -- you have to take it all on. And then you have to take on the risk of fibbing."
Overview of Rails hosting options from a Rails dev
'... I would say list them because it shows your team's ability to innovate. ...'

And I would say put a watch on them because their focus on their prime tasks may drop. If you are putting in your 100% where will you get the extra time?
It can't be that cut and dry. Creative people tinker with stuff. You want creative people. Obviously there is a point where side projects interfere with what you are trying to get done, but a "if you're working on anything else you're not giving 100%" attitude seems very short sighted.
'... fonts bigger ...'

In Fox, "Ctrl +' for bigger and 'Ctrl -' for smaller

'... and visited links darker ...'

good point in Fox de-select, "Edit-Firefox preferences-Content-Colors-Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selections" will change the link colours but also the background.
yeah i could have phrased that title better.
Ask the Wizard: Too Many Companies??
We like people who work on things for fun because it shows they really like hacking. That's why we have a question on the application form asking "what cool things have you built?" On the other hand, if someone were spending time on side projects during the first few months of their startup, that would be a bad sign.
It ought to. Among other things, one ought to get first wind of new trends (including potential competitors) on a site like this.
dogs not supportive of open source
I think it's a good idea to target the early adopters. If you don't, you risk basing your product on old technology.
YC News UK meet up - 15th March, London
On the surface it might look like TextMate but after trying to use it for about 10 min, it fails to live up to this moniker. It doesn't do 20% of what TM does.

Note: I use TM to edit the RoR files.
I'll be at opencoffee club and London 2.0 later today (March 15th). If any YC news users are in London and feel like meeting up then come along!

Open coffee: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1056/?gj=sj3

London 2.0: http://upcoming.org/event/154671/
I'll be there Dan,...so thats 2 of us...anyone else??
"We're more likely to fund people we know are smart from their submissions and comments on YC Startup News." So you won't look at our votes, right?
The way people vote on submissions and comments can be revealing as well, but you won't check those right?
exploiting the top comment :)

my only request is that my comments that received reply could have a different color so that i know they were replied because I missed reading replies on time.
Animate the loading of your site like it was web 2.0
I agree, with some nuances.

"People know what they want, but people also want what they don't know." - Gilberto Gil

People know what they want- when they see it.

They may not be very good at telling you where their itch/pain is out of the blue. They may be taking it for granted and not even feeling it anymore. But if you just start scratching/massaging _somewhere_, you'll get useful "more to the left, no, a bit more up- THERE- AAaaaahh!" feedback. If you're so out of touch that they will push you away rather than steer you into the right spots, well, that's useful info too.

I don't imagine that feedback will be coming easy unless there's the prospect of an almost immediate solution (I'm less likely to discuss back itches on the phone). Your idea, as I understand it, offers a slim chance that each specific problem will be addressed, and even in that case the solution is months away.

Filtering people out isn't necessarily bad. This may help in identifying problems that hurt a lot. What you probably want, though, is problems that hurt lots of people.

Having something like what you propose would be better than not having it, and I don't want to discourage you from the idea. Just don't expect it to replace "trying to guess what many people would want."
It depends on how you use this site. You might've noticed how the top users tend to post articles and spark interesting discussions while new users tend to post news. As a startup founder, you are more interested in analytical articles rather than news. For news, you might be better off subscribing to other sites for a larger scope (i.e. TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, and KillerStartups). There is no shortage of news.

Good analytical articles, however, require that users swipe through their rss feeds, find an interesting piece, and post it here. The value of yc.news, in my opinion, is in the articles that other startup founders find interesting. And that alone makes this place worth your time.