skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oy, another one. Its advantages compared to YC:

1) it is a collective rather than an individual initiative by members of the VC community, serial entrepreneurs, mentors, and angel investors and 2) it incorporates the challenges specific to European entrepreneurs in starting up businesses.

Number 1 is not an advantage. We're entrepreneurs, mentors, and angel investors. The only thing we're not is VCs. But including VCs in a seed funding operation is a bad idea. It means any startup that doesn't get a follow-on funding offer from those VCs will be marked as a loser to all other VCs. Techstars has the same problem.

I'm not sure what number 2 means exactly, but it is unfortunately worded. "Incorporating challenges" sounds like they mean it will be more difficult for a startup to succeed in London than in the US. That's probably not what they mean, but it's probably true.
I'm sure you are already doing this. But
"The four best ways to manage your server

Virtualmin offers four methods for managing your server: Web, mobile device, command line, and remote API. Virtualmin is always available, no matter where you are or how you want to work."

can be...

Virtualmin is always available, no matter where you are. You can conveniently manage your servers through Web, mobile, command line and remote API.

I'd delete the entire paragraph following Try a live demo. Just replace it with a link saying live demo.

With the watch a video paragraph can't you put the picture of the video with a link and a play button on it here?

The little I know about writing I learned from "On writing well" - Zinsser. His chapter on simplicity is worth the price of the entire book.
Problem is more with browser compatibility than the underlying technologies.
Interesting view. I am currently at Essential Web 2007 in London with Saul, and I might confront him with your issues.
Experiment: From coder to marketeer in 1 summer. Promotion Suggestions needed.
This is very good publicity..

Did Heysan change their product but retain the name? Just curious.
A simple, easy, and obvious way to avoid being a commodity
If you don't like Ruby no Rails don't use it. There doesn't have to be some religious debate every time someone 'takes it for a spin'. Ruby on Rails makes you more productive, end of story. (Edited to remove unnecessary flame. Sorry about that, it's been a long week.)
Male oriented marketing
You might be surprised how effective it is just to make sure the user has JavaScript on. Almost all spam-bots do not execute the JavaScript so it is a fairly reliable way to determine if a comment is spam or not. For users without JavaScript you can still degrade nicely to a "type this number in this box" question. Sure, it would be easy to write a bot to get around it, but spammers would be better off just looking for other blogs to spam.

I hate to sound self-promotional, but I did write a plugin that does this for WordPress which can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/jsspamblock/ .
Josh's (PostgreSQL Lead) Rules of Database Contracting
Paul seems to have a negtive attitude towards every one of the recent crop of YC clones. (Of course, perhaps I'm simply misjuding his tone due to insufficient use of emoticons! ;)

Is he worried they will crowd the marketplace and diminish the success rate of YC companies? Does he think they are so poorly constructed that they will harm the young people who get involved? Or is it just a spirit of competetiveness?
And what would this NBE thing be? Next Big Environment? Next Big Emacs mode? Next Big Effort? Any guesses?
Judging by his essays, Paul is clearly for more startups, not less startups.

But you have to admit that, e.g. YEurope is just a cut and paste from YCombinator: from the name, to the website (same Heysan rolling stuff!), the amount they offer, the percentage they take, the application form, etc.

Seriously, who would want to be funded by guys who just copy and can't create even their own ideas and thoughts? It may explain why european startups are just copying US startup concepts to adapt them to european markets...
Since PG and company can't really scale past a pretty small number of startups, I don't really get what the problem is. The more the merrier, until the bubble bursts.
No need for personal attacks ("I don't think the authors rip off of hot or not with pictures of kittens is really a good use case for scaling a popular site." in case it disappears).

Also, I'll just point out that there is certainly a religion of RoR unlike that of any other web framework. Thus, whenever someone makes disparaging comments, some RoR fan takes serious offense. You seem like you were personally offended, for example.
I'm not against the idea; quite the contrary, the more the better. The problem is that most of those copies of YCombinator aren't even started by hackers and they just basically copy their model while at the same time pretending they know the "european way".
If the product isn't trash...its ok. I don't think most people will try 5-7 language learning products before they chose one. As long as it works they'll end up recommending to others.
Nintendo pounds Sony and MS in sales
What is a Business Niche?
In terms of knowing a thing or two about Europe, they probably do, because they are successful European businessmen (and women?).

If they aren't hackers... well, I suppose that just leaves space in the market for someone to go them one better, no?

Basically my point is: as good as the original? Probably not. Good enough, and better than nothing for some people? Probably.
How To Stop Sabotaging Your Business By Setting Your Own Limits
I just get tired of everyone that writes a website becoming an authority on all things Internet related. That said, my comment was off the cuff and I'll retract it. I'm sorry if I hurt any feelings.
There is this great myth that a marketer is critical for start ups. However, all the marketing you need for web apps is to verify that there is a serious problem that you can solve/alleviate. If you build something truly useful with a specific group in mind, then marketing will be easy. When people's hair is on fire, and you're the only one with a fire extinguisher, it's not going to be a hard sell. IMO, most hackers have trouble identifying and solving a worthwhile problem.

For your specific application, social networking for climbers, is there really that much of an interest? Is this something that climbers want? Will you be able to compete with Facebook?
I agree that RoR made me productive. I produced so much custom functions (helpers) like never before in any other framework. Especially love pagination.
The wrinkle is that this project had to run on the Java Virtual Machine. The only reasonably good Python interpreter for the JVM is Jython, which is significantly out of date. He'd have to port Python to to the JVM before porting Rails to Python.
"With the watch a video paragraph can't you put the picture of the video with a link and a play button on it here?"

That's a great idea. Why didn't I think of that?
The startup might delay your schooling, but it's an accelerated education.
thanks for your comments! we will make what goes in the news-feed completely controllable by the users, as soon as possible. we don't reveal any other transaction details in the feed entry of course, but even what we do currently maybe too noisy for some folks. regarding contacts, they show only those contacts with whom you've a pending balance - but it can be confusing. we will get that fixed soon.

it's too bad you encountered a JS error, will look into it soon.
If you actually read the post, you'd see my point is just to warn against the religious fanaticism that surrounds what is essentially a framework. More options are good, right?
This was one of (at least!) 2 good talks on web apps at SXSW, both of which have online sources I've put previously on ycnews:

- http://www.carsonified.com/sxsw.pdf - http://particletree.com/sxsw/autopsy.zip
Everyone is a Frenemy
I understood "google doesn't offer a career path" to mean that there's no structure in place to help you advance to more valuable positions, not necessarily from coder to management. "Developer to Technical Architect" is one example given.

The problem with the traditional corporate structure isn't that advancement is bad, it's that there's often a mistaken assumption that the only thing more valuable than an individual contributor is a manager of individual contributors.

In the end I think this one is a wash. It's hard to see how you could do it both ways, and there are advantages to each. Google's ad hoc style seems to allow freedom to grow in whatever direction you want, and Google will decide later on if it's worth a promotion (to SDE II etc). The author seems to envision a system where the company has specific needs, and will support an employee with training and mentoring until he fits those needs.
And I get tired of people with 6 months RoR under their belt proselytizing it as the last word in programming languages. And in regards to the "omg you're just like hot or not!" comment, um, yeah, sure. Keep thinking that. Good.
NBC Universal making line rider-esque Flash games now???
Fair enough, but I've been using RoR for 2 years and it is amazingly useful. It's a far better web programming environment than php or django. If you didn't like it that's cool, I really don't care, but don't submit your language bashing blog post to newsy. Also, it doesn't really matter if you're a rip off of hot or not as a user that's the first thing I thought as I clicked the back button away from your site.
How are you going to deal with piracy? I have been in Thailand for about half a year. While I was here I had a lot of software ideas to help Thai kids learn English. But, the licensing of high-quality language materials to embed into the software is expensive, so I cannot give it away for free. Yet, most of the Thai people I know think the idea of paying for software is laughable (literally).

Also, from what I know, most people in Asia only have access to computers in internet cafes. Isn't that problematic for you?
Fine effort indeed. But do not forget, he had to do all that heavy lifting just to fit into google's corporate policies. To me JavaScript makes very little sense because I like RoR mostly for the first 'R'.

Putting Ruby aside, I don't see much of "rapid" or "pragmatic" (most hyped words) in Rails. I am coming from ASP.NET and I don't see "Rails" part as a major step forward. The need to manually implement most of user logins/accounts/sessions in Rails alone killed all the time savings I had provided by ActiveRecord.

Frankly, I don't see why everybody is so hyper on MVC. I has been around for ages, old&stinky MFC in 1991 had doc/views but nobody calls MFC cool :-) Is that because more and more of web development is done by people without CS degrees who had never heard of MVC before?
I like this reply:

I don't know what I should and shouldn't say because of the NDA, but it's probably okay to say I'm married to a Googler. He hasn't been there too long, but the only problem we've had so far is that he never seems to want to come home!

Seriously, though, I've seen a lot of articles that might be labeled "sour grapes" about Google lately. (Not to imply that yours is one of them - you made an effort to support your conclusions and it does sound as though you know some unhappy people, which is unfortunate.) The thing is, I've seen my husband go through jobs at other corporations. I've waited up for him on the nights when he was forced to work overtime on a doomed project. I've been there for him while he struggled under the tyranny of dangerously ignorant management. I've seen him waste weeks of his time because of thoughtless and fruitless penny-pinching. He started out so bright, so full of energy and zest for what he does, and over time I watched that energy and passion wilt under buzzing florescent lights in suffocating cubicles.

Corporate life in general is terribly depressing. I personally hate it and work independently. I love what I do and at least this way no one can take my enthusiasm away from me.

But that's exactly why I think what Google is doing is terribly important. More companies need to be that way. They need to be families who treat their employees like children - they take care of them. They reward them for their hard work. They encourage them to be creative, because they know (and you know, too) that it only takes one good idea to make a million dollars. Or a billion. Or an empire.

I'll say this: my husband has never been happier. For that, I'm exceedingly grateful to Google. They've given him something that he deserves, that everyone deserves. I wish it were more widely available. I wish we all could be free to be children, to feel like it's okay to laugh, to look forward to waking up, to nurture the bright and crazy ideas that wander through your head. That really doesn't sound like a bad world to me.
I'd argue that there are at least two other MORE important factors: JS (IMHO) is somewhat closer to Ruby, compared to Python. In fact I suspect that his "secret 20% project" is Ruby to JS compiler (or vice versa)

Also, (most importantly) using the same language for server AND client development is big-big win. He's been dreaming of a universal "web platform" which allows you to have real development process: pieces of you app here and there, and you freely move them around, executing server or client side, whatever works best for you at the moment. Because right now you have this huge stack of things to keep bookeeping for: HTML/CSS/JS/Ruby/SQL, all sitting in their own little files with their own little syntax. At least he got last 3 merged into one solid JS framework.
Marc, you're definitely on a roll with these essays. One typo: quit pro quos should be quid pro quos.
http://calamitygame.com/index.php?s=566

Try this one (i didnt make it but its cool)
it works better if you zoom all the way out before pressing play.
Very cool! I did not get one part: are you the same team who makes webmin?
No, you just didn't know what their product was. It's not your fault. I didn't know what their product was either until around about demo day (two months into the Winter Founders Program). They've got some fruity MySpace widget that they built for marketing purposes and everybody thinks it's their product...their product is actually universal IM for mobile devices. Way cooler than yet another MySpace widget, eh?

Matters aren't helped by the fact that the widget was released months before the product (the product is still not properly launched, I don't think).
"I always try to dress up because of my lower-than-average IQ."

I don't really have much to add to that statement, except that I appreciate the man's honesty.
I had the exact same question; thanks for the explanation.

This does not seem to be very efficient branding. Either you haven't heard of them yet or you're left thinking something along the lines of "Looks like that widget company has given up and switched to mobile im, maybe Slide or someone scared them off"
Audio and the User Experience
good points yubrew, but without giving it an honest effort you can't find out.

It's not like competing with Facebook, more like competing with Digg. I think niche-specific aggregation sites can be interesting & I've decided to give it a summer to prove me wrong.

climbers do spend a lot of time hunting for videos, pics, news online, so I think aggregation can work, on a small scale
For an IM web work around, I personally prefer Meebo (http://meebo.com) since it works for Google talk, Yahoo messaging, AIM, etc. It would be nice if they have an iPhone version available.
Kartik, Right on the mark! You haven't seen ugly until you have seen buracrazy, but you've got to do what you've got to do! :)
my impression was that likebetter's troubles weren't really problems with rails so much as problems with their hosting co, bandwidth, and maybe the usual db scaling issues. correct me if I'm wrong, though.
Max Levchin: "The last time I got kids to drop out of college, they all bought houses for cash."
Facebook Acquisitions: Fad or Proof of Platform Success?
Danah Boyd on social networks again, but now in audio
This talk is awesome. (Yes, I'm the same person who thought Danah Boyd's paper was a little wishy-washy. But this talk is awesome, because it has a lot of interesting observations and not nearly as many doubtful conclusions. In the Q&A, she does get into some conclusions, and it gets fuzzier again.)
It's not so much the single occurrence as the general activity that I was railing against.

You view it as "creating something that 1.4 million people wanted", I view it as "1.4 people thought it was marginally amusing for a brief period".

My complaint isn't that those 1.4 people aren't there, it's that their approach to the "product" will result in a non-viable long term position.

I'm not saying you can't make money on fads, I'm saying that you can't make money long term (ie enough to recoup investment) on fads. This case may be small, but it's a symptom of a type of thinking that is gaining prevalence - the same type of thinking that caught us in version 1.0 with our pants down.
"I find the concept of the long detour fascinating.It says that the company believed strongly in the original vision, but recognized that the time was not ripe to realize the plan." Recognized that the time was not ripe? Personally I don't see the point of this article. What concept is he talking about? They have the idea - they raise 80m $ - they try - does not take off. Fine. They "scale down"- "re-evaluate" their "product line" - find something that sells - survive on that. Ok. Then they sell that something that sells to concentrate on the original idea (which they had not given up upon but had "maintained" all these years). Reads like a marketing effort. I don't see the point. So I suggest: Unless you consider "a long detour" a fascinating concept - Timing is still everything.
Heysan's advantage is that it runs (very well) on the crappy browsers most cellphones come with. I imagine, if anything, the iPhone has made Meebo more of a competitor to Heysan than before, given that the iPhone comes with a fully working web browser.

But congrats to Heysan on a great press hit and a great product!
It doesn't matter what value FB has to you, really. You don't pay for it!

My issue is FB is a leader in terms of "2.0". A leader based economically on a pile of sand (ads) If FB fails, it will scare the market and poof! There goes your "2.0 boom".

I'm not looking at FB from a consumer's perspective, I'm looking at it from an investment/business perspective.

Being that you're still in college, you should keep in mind that many of us have experienced this same exact phenomenon before.
Why is that the obvious implication, especially whith the two home-run examples he gives?

Starbucks and Microsoft are built on smaller transactions than one would expect from enterprise software. Starbucks does it $3 at a time. Microsoft established itself selling desktop software for for a few hundred a pop, and for quite a while, it was selling a couple of copies at a time until they gained enough momentum to sell their desktop software to whole departments and later even whole enterprises.

Interesting to consider that the average annual revenue Starbucks gets from a regular customer, is probably similar, or even a bit more than the annual revenue Microsoft gets per-seat from its best enterprise customers. A reminder that one should balance the difficulty of acquiring a customer against the lifetime value of that customer.

Getting $1 from a million people might be a tough business, but getting $20/year from 50,000 people one dollar at a time is conceivable.

Flickr might be a good example (though a little on the big side). When they were acquired by Yahoo, just a little over a year from their debut, they already had ~400,000 registered users. Within a few more months, they had a million, and a few months after that a million more. I'd postulate that nearly all of that post-acquisition growth (and much more) came from existing momentum rather than their association with Yahoo.

I don't know if the same ratios held back then, but when I looked a few months back, about 15% of flickr accounts were flickr pro accounts bringing in $24.95 in annual revenue. Thats 300,000 x $24.95, or $7M in annual revenue, just from pro accounts.

Margins were low, or negative, because they were going for growth, but they had various knobs they could twiddle. First off, a little after the Yahoo acquisition they cut the pro subscription price (by half, I believe). In addition, they controlled the amount of storage and upload bandwidth available to both free and pro account holders. Taken together these variables gave them latitude in picking margins. Even a relatively paltry 13% margin would have generated $1M in profit.
She has no actual evidence for ANY of her 'research.' I'd like to see some real research in this area... until then, everything coming out of her mouth could be BS.
I don't recall the exact wording anymore, but it was something about how your control panel interface is better than the competition.
Kevin Rose's New Startup: Pownce
hey that reminds me... how do I get an invite to the YC linked-in group?
Why is the interesting? Some weak marketing speak (oh, but with attitude) and no product I can actually try without giving them my contact info and hoping they pick me (please, oh please, pick me, please)

BTW, I've never used Akismet because I started using Spamkarma2 before Akismet became standard. SK2 has done an excellent job for me. It scores spam using a bunch of different tests, including an encrypted javascript payload.

I've had very few false positives or negatives.
that's a long article.
i think http://morecute.com kicked their butt and got all the users
added tothe fact that RoR really sucks
they also ripped off http://www.morecute.com
who knows? vaporware for now. no solid information as to how they're differentiating themselves, and i doubt they licensed akismet's corpus, which is well over half a billion in size.

it could be just as flaky and unreliable as akismet.
I should clarify that I think the phone will be a success in the long run. It's very exciting to see the bar raised and I hope this ushers in a new era of mobile development. I just don't see 10 million units leaving the shelves this year.
I would make "Download/Buy Virtualmin" more prominent on the main page. In fact, I'd try to give it as much prominence as the "Find Out More" button.

At first, I was confused about whether this was a service or if it was shrink-wrap software for you to buy and install on your own servers. I suspected the latter, but didn't know for sure and was kind of frustrated that I couldn't tell. I clicked on the demo link and the "find out more" link before coming back to the main page and finding the "buy online" link down at the bottom.
I wonder the same thing about those executive houses. In my 3 month housing search I have seen the same places available the whole time.
Doesn't look earth shattering to me. Facebook can do all this stuff
Nice work. NetworthIQ (that's me) also made the article. Good times for all.
Be the nail that sticks out - how to get hired by an interesting company
Deep Thinkers Need Not Apply: How To Get Ahead In the Modern Business World
get a free iPhone by waiting in line and selling hotdogs
Is that a problem? I kinda thought the variety was interesting. But, if it's disconcerting rather than exciting, I'll make it a bit more predictable. Shows what I know. ;-)

Anybody else find randomized screenshots on the front page (and then not matching the big version on the screenshots page) troublesome?
Yes. Jamie, my co-founder is the primary author of all 300,000+ lines of code in Webmin and the 90,000+ lines of code in Usermin. (I'm not entirely convinced he's human.)