skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inside the High-Tech Hunt for a Missing Silicon Valley Legend
Googles Rivalry Comming: From Jimmy Wales by End of 2007 A
Courage to Change Direction, Letters to Graduating YC Companies, Letter 1
It's important for you to focus on your demo for the next 10 days before demo day. Focus focus focus, and you'll do great.
Schmoozing builds the networks that keep Silicon Valley humming
Consider the scene the other night at Trader Vic's in Palo Alto. More than 200 people -- mostly startup entrepreneurs and their guests, plus a contingent of venture capitalists -- assembled for an event dubbed "Founder Hacks," staged by STIRR. The group is part of the vanguard of the valley's tech-biz social scene, now boasting bloggers and camera crews posting video on the Web.
I think it's a bad idea. I would not have released it until the torrent sharing was decentralized.

Or maybe he had no problems knowing that many of his users would have their lives ruined and many more would be scared away from using it. His reason for this shortcoming, along with lack of effective stenography in the protocol is now clear, he wanted to build a business around it.
25k?

That's really weak. You have nothing to regret.
There's still lots of room for better porn sites.

The barrier to entry you mentioned keeps everyone away though...
Thanks for the reply. I definitely like the easier to use aspect of jjot, but to make it really convenient (and win me over), it would be nice to have a dashboard widget for OSX that would let me see my notes in the dashboard, but save them on the web to be able to edit/access them at e.g. work.
Depends greatly on your definition of "idea."

For me, an idea is very thorough and well thought out. The execution is then trivial, except for publicity and other stuff that's really hard to control.

Ideas are far from worthless. I'll give anyone $2000 right now for a good idea that investors like enough to get me out of this near debt I'm struggling through.
I had the idea of creating a social stock market type thing a couple of years ago. There appear to be a few that are moderately successful, but it's a pretty obvious idea in any case, so I'm not too worried about it.
The best analysis I've heard of this is:

"Location is a much poorer indication of intent than Search."
Artists can now sell downloads directly thanks to this startup
Let me tell you about a startup artists have been waiting for a long time: DiscRevolt
Arrington: "As best we can tell" twitter raised 5 on 20 valuation
Sorry for posting this. When I first skimmed it, I was concentrating on the idea but after re reading it, the grammar and spelling is so poor it probably shouldn't have made it up.
Yes, but a combination of search and location will beat just search any day.
Bristol, England (Canadian/British)
Video content delivery startup Arootz has raised $7 million from Gemini and Genesis funds
Arootz, a developer of solutions for simultaneous distribution of video content through internet infrastructure, has raised $7 million from Israeli venture funds Gemini Israel and Genesis Venture Capital.
@robin_bb: Moncton
I hate/luv my job social network
Alright guys, I haven't research this one, but can someone put together a social network for people who hate their jobs and are trying to find ways to get out. Obviously the best way to do what they love would be to connect with people who already doing it. Hook it up and let me know. You got 2 weeks.
You're always working for someone else. Startups are for people who prefer working for customers as opposed to working for a boss. Whether the former is infinitely better depends on the customers and on the boss.
Live from Boston, Easier TV and Radio on Your Phone
Time was when telephones were only for talking, radios were for listening, and TVs were for watching. But digitization and the wireless Internet mean that no piece of content stays in its original medium for long. And today a Boston startup is emerging from stealth mode to unveil the latest cross-media technology, a streaming-media service that lets users watch TV shows and listen to podcasts and live radio via their cell phones' built-in Web browsers.
Hm ... great idea :)
Avoid the curse of plenty, build on the cheap.  Worked for "El Mariachi".
Just to clarify, if smugmug never planned on a sale or IPO, then it was never a startup? I may have to adjust my own thinking on what startup means.
Ning... maybe?
its hands down the best... along with all the official and third party plugins available for it.
Make a facebook group.
The love machine concept and the way to handle budgeting are great.
I would not be surprised if a new wave of startups brings web 2.0 to business. Remember what happened when Visicalc launched on the Apple 2? :)
"If I had a million dollars I'd do 2 chicks at the same time!"

Seriously, I don't see the issue. Do you have any friends? If you're lacking in the friends department then don't read any further and work on companionship as your number one goal. I find a lot of joy organizing events, outings or exciting weekends for my friends. Make sure the trip has a baseline that everyone can afford and then maybe cover a tab or two while you're out. Ideas don't have to be grandiose they are just excuses to hang out and enjoy life together. I thought of a few things I enjoy and listed them below. Have fun planning these events on your own. Research destinations fully and be prepared to promote your trips so others will join you! Its time consuming (and fun) to figure out the 'best' places to go. Does the outing require that you buy any gear? Research the equipment and then buy it!

Go Camping

Hiking

Deep Sea fishing

Host a wine party / plan a trip to a winery

Trip to another City for the Weekend

Trip to another Country

Get a boat

Attend a music festival (Jazz Fest for example)

Take up a sport like Biking (Road or Mountain)

Hopefully this helps you out somewhat. If you wish to be as happy as me, I'll require $5 to share 'the secret'.

Enjoy :)
Energy. Biofuels will continue to remain hot until people realize what a terrible idea they are. Then I'd bet on photovoltaics and advanced battery technologies.

Oh, you meant in software? ;-)

I think that VOIP/videoconferencing/telecommuting software will get even huger than it is now, along with better social software to manage these interactions. There're three main drivers for this:

1.) The cost of bandwidth continues to plummet. YouTube showed that it's feasible to stream decent-quality video to millions of users at once.

2.) The cost of gas continues to skyrocket. As commuting becomes more expensive, more knowledge workers will look for an alternative to commuting. Given current technology, it's easier simply not to drive than to find more fuel-efficient ways of driving.

3.) Certain companies and projects are showing that it's feasible to work in geographically distributed teams. 37signals has about half of their staff in the Chicago office. The ICFP contest involves a very tricky task that's usually performed by teams of half a dozen people distributed all around the globe. A lot of volunteer organizations and nonprofit websites have large (sometimes > 200 people) teams and no physical office.
I think the techniques that are being developed for consumer Web 2.0 apps will start penetrating the business market. And as mobile phone continue to gain location identification technologies, mobile apps will finally start gaining more market.
Isn't this pretty much what YCombinator startup Overhear.us is doing?
I found it fascinating to read the perspective of someone familiar with ML and Haskell but not with Lisp. I wonder how many people like that there are out there? Most people into ML and Haskell are hard-core enough to have learned many languages, and CL or Scheme would generally be one of them.
Service to help save our cell phone payment
I'm looking forward to this. For the past year they've been charging me for unknown reasons and make me get through the endless customer service calls.
JQuery Essentials - Part Deux
a collection of startup stories
Hi all,
I just built this site to store and collect people's experiences and stories of doing startups. Could you guys critique the site and maybe add some stories? Thanks.
Only when location it is relevant.

I'd hazard that 95% of the time that I search, I don't care about location. Pretty much everyone will ship to where I am.

Here's the thing: I believe that location-based apps are more about pushing local ads to users than they are about providing services. While that remains the case, they will be a nonstarter.
Have you published research papers/technical articles?  If so, which one(s) are you most proud of?
hi all, I just made this site, could you critique it and maybe submit some stories to share with everyone.
Most investors don't fund ideas.
No, I don't think they do. I think they use %HH encoding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29
Why it is in Microsoft's self-interest to have an OS that is prone to catching viruses.
Without viruses, most people would just pirate their software, thus severely damaging the commercial software industry.
Google's "doubly lucky" predictive mobile search plans
Rumored to be predictive (much like T9 is for SMS), and account for time and location information in the results.
Personally I think that products that help people mange information overload while providing them a social experience are going to take off in the year or so. Basically finding ways to tailor information towards the individual instead of just analyzing the data for the general population.
Inside eROI: Startup Grows Up - Lessons Learned (Part 5)
Lessons Learned
When you go through an emotional and professional journey like this one, it only makes sense to share my mistakes and the few things I did right. There are hundreds of lessons in just this one story, but I'll share my top five:
Reid Hoffman invests in Care.com
No way. It may not be as easy as people make it seem, but if you take care of yourself, and dress really well (I'm talking Armani, etc) there is no way it's not easier. Personality is still a factor, but money gets you in the door.
I dont understand your logic.. How could being prone to virus attacks be desirable for Microsoft? From a brand image perspective it is very bad. This is one of the major selling points Apple has over Microsoft, that OSX is less virus prone.
Overhear lets you talk about your workplace in general thats it. I want a place where i can say I HATE being President of a Multinational ... My dream job would be to open a coffee shop and have special drinks like MAC latte, GeekMochachino....I dunno. some place where the future "tech billionaires" will come hang out and trade me some stocks for free coffee....
If you are a commercial software developer, you would like an operating system where security risks discourage users from pirating your software.

Yes, there's a limit to what users will tolerate. A system that is too insecure would not work. But the virus threat needs to be real to discourage piracy.

Ultimately, users do care about an OS with lots of software available. Many users will put up with some security threats to get that.
I think overhear.us is a place where you can bitch about your job, but doesn't offer any way to do anything about it. Rokhayakebe is suggesting to fix this problem via social networking.

I think the alternatives are the intact networks that people use to find new jobs (alumni, friends, professionals, head hunters). How will it compete with Facebook?

Right now on Facebook, I can search by employer of interest (e.g. Google, McKinsey, etc) and it will pop up the closest contacts by some sort of FoaF distance algorithm. I can friend them and message them to open up a dialogue.
The 10 Commandments of Supporting Your Family
Recovering alcoholics are really onto something. They've discovered over at AA that they can accomplish more with a support group in place than they can working individually. Their struggle with addiction seems a lot more manageable knowing that they're not alone in their struggle. So where's the support group for those of us who support our families? Where are the Mom and Dad support groups? And what should these support groups even look like?
That is a good start. Who ever wants to do it should add audio and video support. just so I can say this SH?? out loud. That would make me feel good.
The behavior of ants is certainly amazing. But take a look at behavior based robotics to see how well it scales. You won't find something as capable as, say, a cat. At least not by human design. The system needed to evolve such behaviors through EA would need to be quite complicated. We've seen systems that can do a pretty good job on mobility -- like that flopping starfish from Cornell. But locomotion is exactly the type of problem that has a very precise, quantitative objective function.

But perhaps I was too broad. I should have said orderable, which is really all that matters. You have to know something is better than something else. But you can't just take a euclidean distance in high dimensional objectives. Things just don't work like that. A real-world example: work-life balance. The two parts are just not really comparable, making optimization difficult. That's what I'm talking about.

Also, EA has lots of potential for lots of areas, but you have to compare it to other methods of solving a problem to talk about quality of the approach. Machine Learning offers a host of methods. Here is a great list of them
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awm/
I would disagree with #2. Gas prices have little effect on commuting. The gas prices have not had a major effect on consumption. The larger factor is traffic in large metropolitan areas. Driving an hour each way is far more detrimental than an extra 5$.

Biofuels have their place. They are not the magical pill that will wean America of middle eastern oil but they surely have their respectable percentage over time.
A big difference between the .com bubble of the late 90's and the situation right now is in the number of companies applying for an IPO. That number is still currently a fraction of .com bubble levels.

VC investments are on the rise but still lower than at the peak of the bubble.

When looking at these statistics it doesn't yet resemble what we saw in the late 90's. Maybe people learned their lesson. Or it could be just the resulting chilling effect from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act... Its a lot more difficult to go public nowadays.
True, but there's a blurry line between local ads pushed on users and local services provided to users.
Making the Most of Online Matchmaking for Small Firms
I got mine to work on the first install. Do you have the latest JRE installed?
No we are not at the start of a Web 2.0 BUBBLE. We are at the beginning of the Web 2.0 investment CYCLE.

We are starting up the curve where investment, attention and innovation are rising. A BUBBLE is later up the curve.

A BUBBLE has a negative connotation and implies that negative things can or are happening. The question you would be asking in a bubble is "Everyone has made a ton of money, can this get any bigger or should I get out now before the floor crashes through?"

I don't see anyone in that mindframe yet.
10 Lessons In Leadership From Don Corleone
How Top Bloggers Earn Money
It only seems blurry when you're pushing ads; I think that users find it pretty clear.

I'd suggest that an example for "non-ad services" is CraigsList.
suits suck
Do's and Don'ts for Wooing Angel Investors
Yes, I do. Does it have something to do with installing a LISP implementation?
I'm hoping for mobiles myself. If the Hecl language were to do moderately well, that would be a nice thing for me. It was well received at OSCON, where I gave a presentation on it.

One of the reasons that I think that mobiles will do well is that I think there are a huge number of untapped possibilities out there as phones keep getting faster and better connected. We're all walking around with computers in our pockets and we don't use them at all, currently.
I don't think this is a half-bad idea, frankly. My thoughts/suggestions:

1. the hardest part here would be the GPS hardware component. Marketing and selling that would be expensive. Perhaps there is a way to track via existing devices? I don't know, I'm not up on my GPS tech.

2. I wouldn't even worry about the whole airplane thing anytime soon.

3. I could see this being really popular with couples/families. You could also link it to something where if the wife wants milk, she can tag it, and as the husband approaches a store selling milk, viola, text msg. telling hime to get milk. Pretty complex, but neat.

Good luck to you.
Someone is going to change the model of how we interact with computers. Keyboards are good, mice are good, big plasma screens are really good, but what's next? Is there a faster or more efficient or more enjoyable way to interact with computers? Do computers have to be boxy? Do monitors have to be rectangular? Unless we have reached the pinnacle of "consumer input/output devices," startups will eventually write the applications that take advantage of the new model - that is, if it's not startups that design the model.
Dude, I like to promote my blog too, but this has about as much relevance to start-ups as a collection of the most loved songs about cucumbers.

At least make it remotely relevant before submitting, or you'll never win any friends here.
Passive applications (RescueTime, Di.FM, targeted advertising are examples).
Huge improvements in that area may only come when a new medium arrives.
Just a point: Social Networking is not a cure all for everything. I'd imagine, the market for people who hate their current jobs and want to get out is both small (most people don't have the guts) and temporary (once you do it, it's done).

I don't imagine this would be a successful venture, but who knows?
It's not a good question to think about - nothing positive can result.

Anyway, I had the idea for throwback sports jerseys way back when. I was so mad when they became a hit. Now I realize execution is much more important.
Disastr - peer-to-peer disaster response (second link)
American Red Cross reviewed disaster response plan with a web component that is not far from the level of some Y-Combinator type start up projects.
Wikia details plans for search rival to Google
budddy. 80% of all people dislike their jobs. Now Hating is totally more then disliking, but disliking is the start.
I say:
- Loopt
- Zenter
- One of this session's companies (probably those English guys that were looking to hire at the beginning of the session)
Ten Questions with CmdrTaco: Slashdot, Digg and Conspiracy Theories
Hanlon's Razor applies here: "Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice."
iPhone rival lands $20 million in VC funding
Developers, beware. Facebook really is the new Microsoft
It doesn't matter what the reason for these security issues is. Microsoft could still benefit from the current situation regardless.
Secret to Aspiring Entrepreneurs: Take Humanity Classes!
Engineer classes are great, but humanities are not so bad either!
It is. The problem is that what pg says will have a real impact on y combinator companies.

Even if we disregard its effect on cliques, and even if you disregard the morale issues that could result from the mentor saying "you're not as fun as these other guys," relationships with investors and end-users could be harmed. I gather that's not the sort of thing you should carelessly mess around with.
I was a stay-at-home Dad while starting up my startup. Seems relevant to me, as I thought about this stuff constantly. In fact, in PG's top reasons to not start a startup, he lists "I have a family" as an excuse, and says that this is a valid concern.
I don't see what the problem is. If I recall correctly, the videos application was developed in-house before the platform was ever released to third-party developers. Because videos and other applications started building their own walls, facebook opened the wall for platform users. This is a good thing for developers, not a bad thing.

The statement that "Facebook engineers will detect it, copy the functionality, and render your app pointless" is a pretty wild claim to make without backing it up with evidence.
I didn't say they didn't dislike them; but they won't leave them either.

80% of people not willing to stop doing something they don't like to do isn't a recipe for anything but a giant bitch fest.

Of course, that might in itself be profitable.
Bittorrent grew out of MojoNation, a "distributed, peer to peer, file store", per wikipedia. So it already had a business sponsoring it.

Distributing content tracking is much harder than distributing the content, and if they'd waiting to solve that problem before publishing code, it probably would have died. I think there's a lesson here: don't wait to solve all your problems before you launch, because even if some of them are insoluble, the parts you have solved might be useful enough to be successful. I suppose other people have more concisely summed that up as "release early; release often", eh?
There are three papers which I'm really proud of:

1. Colin Percival, Rapid multiplication modulo the sum and difference of highly composite numbers, Mathematics of Computation, Volume 72, Number 241, Pages 387-395, 2002.
http://www.daemonology.net/papers/fft.pdf

2. Colin Percival, Cache missing for fun and profit, presented at BSDCan '05, May 2005.
http://www.daemonology.net/papers/cachemissing.pdf

3. Richard Brent, Colin Percival, and Paul Zimmermann, Error bounds on complex floating-point multiplication,
Mathematics of Computation, Volume 76, Number 259, Pages 1469-1481, 2007.
http://www.daemonology.net/papers/complexmultiply.pdf
Deploying on EC2 + S3
Hello all,

I have a little side project I'm getting ready to launch. It's a Rails app using MySQL (though database choice doesn't matter, since it's Rails). I'm considering launching the app purely on S3 + EC2. The idea is, the code will live in S3 by using the S3 filesystem component. I can develop locally and deploy via Capistrano when I push out a new release. The code is then deployed to S3 and the EC2 instance restarts.

I'm wondering if this is even viable. Has anyone else that you know of done it?

For the database, I have two options. I could either leave the database on the EC2 instance and back it up nightly and never restart the instance (since data only disappears if you restart the instance or due to a hardware failure). The advantage there is database queries are most likely much faster, since it doesn't have to hit the network for each new database query. The disadvantage is, the data may disappear at the drop of a hat, and then it's backup-restore time. The other option is keeping the database in S3, which seems totally secure but might be slow for queries. I'll, of course, be using memcached and other caching mechanisms, but database load seems like it could still play a part.

What d'you think, would you launch on EC2 + S3?
I also agree. I think passive applications will start to take more of a role in making things easier for users without them having to constantly tell the technology what to do.

Web 2.0 seems to me like we have taken one step backwards with regard technological innovation. There's nothing inherently advanced about tagging (which seems to be one of the corner stone features of web 2.0), to me it's a thing that could have been done in the 1980's (if not 70's). All thats been done recently is we figured that computers on their own cannot do all that we expect it to.

Unfortunately I think in figuring this out we have gone a little too much on the extreme end of things. Users are now at the point where they constantly have to tag EVERY SINGLE THING to find it.

But this is not a complete bashing of the way the web is now, perhaps we needed to take that one step backward, before we can now move several steps forward.
Towards the Attention Economy: Will Attention Silos Ever Open Up?
Are Small Custom Website Application Development Businesses Viable Anymore? - David Hayden [MVP C#]
Why False Starts Hurt Your Project