skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That movie is really great -- the title is perfect. I think it's basically a lesson in what not to do. Two non-hackers start a company and skip the make-a-great-product stage completely. Watching them it feels like borderline fraud.

--

I bought Spolsky's "Aardvark" documentary and enjoyed it a lot, but I wish it had more YC in it. I wish YC funded two guys to make a documentary about YC. If the guys were good at it maybe they could create a product around that. Maybe something that makes it easy for "normal" people to make documentaries.
I up-voted a comment by mistake and there doesn't seem to be a way to remove my vote.

One of the main reasons I was visiting Reddit in the beggining, was the high probability to find start-up articles and a place for discussion. So, this site is defenetely going to be my new point of reference, and for lots of others too.
As someone who did a PhD in a creative kind of computer science field and felt frustrated by the success of those who choose more trodden PhD paths - I was going to agree with this. But in start-ups as well as PhDs success is defined by the number of people you give value to not how creative you were.
O'Reilly 2003 classic: &#34;Piracy is Progressive Taxation&#34;
Where is the Freshbooks of Accounting?
"At the last YC dinner Joe Krauss talked about..."

Okay, that's just not fair. Paul Graham _AND_ Joe Kraus? That's like cheating. How much do I have to pay to have these dinners recorded and published on Google Video? I can't be alone in being willing to pay. (Yeah..I know this is one of the big features of YC so probably not willing to allow recording...*sigh*)
Facebook's little digital gift
Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design
For those based in Switzerland, one resource could be venturelab.ch - I haven't used it myself, but a quick browse of the website leaves me with some mixed feelings. The business-focus of the site seems to underline the sentiment in the article of the anti-startup attitude in Europe. On the other hand, the "success stories" and comments sprinkled throughout the site show that there is some hope. It would be interesting to attend one of their events, just to see if it's all marketing-speak, or if there's actually anything worthwhile to the initiative.
The scriggler application is awesome. I have wanted someone to make something like that for years. Good-bye paper mailing lists at my shows.
Georgia Business Launch 2007--$100k cash prize for winning startup business
The Fall of Modernity
The deadline for the first entry has passed, but it's still a cool program that the local technical networking group and a state-funded technology group are doing.
Freeze 'condemned Neanderthals'
List of Venture Capitalist Blogs
dot.com vs web 2.0
Couldn't you have taken a sabbatical? I mean, did you just totally walk away from it? I took a sabbatical for a year from a PhD in CS to pursue some medical science ideas, then went back when they didn't go far enough to make a living on. Not flaming, just curious.
Absolutely! Creativity is as important, if not more so, than technical skill.
There are different forms of creativity, some more open-ended than others. Most research done in scientific fields is not what I would call open-ended creativity. BTW, the most creative idea I have seen recently actually came from the Univ of Washington & Microsoft Research: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/. The most creative one prior to that came from a phd student @ CMU: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143. It would be interesting to see what percentage of successful startups are conceptually clever with mind-blowing ideas such as these. As an example of one, I really like http://www.likebetter.com/.
Acorn - Develop your ideas online
Quick way to recommend links to friends
A few months ago I was in the same boat as the author. I can vouch that you encounter incredulous looks and disbelief, but that sort of thing can happen when start with a good team (as opposed to starting with a good idea).
Finding your Inner Entrepreneur
hiring good hackers - joel on software
Cross train your brain - secrets of greatness
Start up review - case studies of succesful internet startups
Startupping - a community for Internet entrepreneurs
Why don;t you make this invite only - if it truly reflects the values of Y's and their friends who are starting up why not do that. That way you preserve the signal to noise ratio. I'm only on here cos Kulveer and Harj are doing Y combinator - meaning that other UK young entrepreneurs who are good can get on it.
I don't think that this movie is free (as in speech) to distribute. It came out in 2001 and is still being sold by retailers*. On that note, thanks for bringing it to my attention, now I may buy it! (* http://preview.tinyurl.com/2w6tob )
How is this any different than e-mail? What I would enjoy is a way to browse, categorize, and rate everybody's ideas. Ideas are neat to read about even if they're terrible. The only problem with such a facility is that potentially businesses could come and steal an idea and perhaps even profit from it.
As a former employee of Lands' End, I can attest to the quality of their customer service. (The quality of the internal employee care is less good than it used to be, since back when I started there in 1998, but I could just be bitter after the I/S department layoffs! :-)

Anyway, the whole customer service area is saturated in an ethic of serving the customer. It really is amazing. For example, there are no timers on the calls. Ever wonder why some CSR's are so brusk? Well, they're usually trying to beat the clock. If their average call time goes above some magic number (often as low as two or three minutes) then they get written up by their supervisor. No such problem at Lands' End.

I had to smile that Joel linked to the OCS (The Online Customer Store where he orders his logo'd shirts). I was one of the lead developers on that project. :-)

As for what happens to the returned items? They're sold off in the company employee store for a few dollars. If the company makes stipulations about the use of their logo, then a patch is applied over it, before selling to the employees, to protect the customers brand. As I recall, most customers don't mind.
For international users:

S-corp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_corporation<br/>
C-corp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_corporation

Not terms I was familiar with [edit] doesn't seem to be recognising line breaks.
For international users:

S-corp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S_corporation
C-corp: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_corporation

Not terms I was familiar with.
I think the purpose of this site is (partially) to get a better idea of who to invite to things like Startup School and YC interviews. Making it invite only would be contrary to that goal. I think the S/N ratio will stay pretty high simply due to the nature of the people YC attracts.
It is free for people to distribute, it's just that you have guilt about it, but feel free to live within your own code.
Amazingly, Kaleil is now selling business advice at his personal website. http://www.kaleil.com/

Aardvark sounds like an interesting doc -- so far can't find it online though.

Indeed, they had no product... and 233 employees.
An excellent example of how to use technology to make a system seamless and intuitive. We would all do well to understand that it doesn't matter if the system is written in ab programming language, using the xyz framework and rst database; it is the fact that it usable and available that makes it a successfull application.
Scaling web apps (sets of slides by Flickr architect)
This is a pretty cool site to keep track of, thanks.
Oh WOW. This is an absolute gold mine. Case studies of dozens of them. They even have the CEOs of Rotten Tomatoes posting there in response. This is great. Thank you so much.
Fairly awesome!

Thanks for the unique resource. If I could I probably would like to put most of these links in my personal bookmark.

Nice interface. Nice change. It's good to hear that Arc is coming along also. :-)
Yeah, also its quite interesting to see the commonalities between the successful startups in different industries - stuff like focusing on cheap distribution first then monetisation, and also seeing how team dynamics and business models evolve. In addition to founders at work - essential reading.
And Cal Henderson is a Brit too ;)
How to compete with your customers
Klipboardz Blog - Bringing social media to IPTV
The Best and Worst Decisions of Founders
seven habits of highly effective programmers
VC Valuations Are On The Rise
SeekSift Tracks Syndicated Content
Just a little bit of graphic design wouldn't hurt, really. In any case, congratulations on the launch and I'm sure it will become an interesting hub.
Disclosure: my company (a software firm in NYC) is behind SeekSift.
Tech IPOs Are Coming Back
I really respect your decision. Good luck and I hope to hear great things.
2007, the year of the tech IPO?
you're bananas if you think a startup is going to help you meet girls or improve your social life. especially an electronics website startup... yikes.
Mozes SMS Service Raises $5m
I've been using the site for a few days now. My feature requests involve getting rid of potential roadblocks:

Some kind of persistent cookie-based login would be nice. Having to login each time I return to the site is annoying.

Larger default fonts. Yes, I can change my browser's preferences and override your font size. No, I don't want to have to do that for each of the browsers on each of the different computers I use throughout the day!

A longer username limit. abstractnonsense wasn't allowed so I had to use abstractbill instead. Not a big deal, but it did strike me as a rather small limit.

Overall though congrats on the site. I've grown tired of reddit as it has moved away from its early demographic and this is just what I've been looking for. Cheers.
NHL disables Youtube clip embeds
Second Life headed for currency collapse?
It seems to me that it is useful at least to have some kind of prototype idea that can push your exploration of what you might want to do. Having *no* idea of what to do seems a little extreme, a bit like a show about *absolutely nothing*.
VC valuations on the rise
Paul,

can we play with arc, go on, please, you know you want us to really, go on mate, have a heart.

<smile/>
HOWTO: Build a bulletproof startup
What we learned building Slideshare (Scalable Web Architectures (w/ Ruby and Amazon S3))
HOWTO: Form a company (detailed outline of process)
Exactly. If you are devoted to one specific field then grad school makes a lot of sense. I also dropped out of grad school in October partially because I didn't see myself devoting my career to the particular sub-field I was in.
This is from that terrible book by Nesheim. I wouldn't trust anything he says.
Start Valuations on the Rise
Making the site invite-only would be the opposite of what we want. One of the goals of this site is to discover smart people we might not otherwise notice when they apply for funding. Doing things through connections works well in the VC world. Because of the large investments they make, they're more conservative. But in the seed funding business you need to be aggressively democratic.
Best & Worst Decisions Starting Companies
Yeah, I know. The site is at least simple and functional, but we should (and will) make it look better soon.
Please tell us what features you'd like in news.ycombinator
So what about Flex and, especially, Apollo (http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo) then? Is Apollo likely to achieve mass adoption? Would startups be well advised to consider building applications on it?
If I bought yspace.com would you use it?
as long as the startup makes money the girls wont care what it's selling.
I noticed a several people suggesting features in other threads, so I'm starting one explicitly for that. I know there's a lot that needs improving; the site is pretty bare-bones at this stage. So propose whatever new features you think we need, and vote for the ones that you want most.
I wouldn't say "requires". There is a common saying in physics grad schools:
Put monkey in lab.
Wait 10 years.
Monkey gets PhD.
if you take a sabbatical then you haven't really risked anything. you have to go all the way. what do you guys think about James from Hot or Not giving up his millions. He probably went out to a nice dinner to celebrate.
Choices = Headaches
Tech IPOs: They're back!
You wrote on reddit that an RSS feed is coming. If you're prioritizing that would be my first choice.
Counterpoint to all the calls for an RSS feed: Do others find reddit's front-page feed useful? Nobody at a social news site has yet figured out how to do the RSS feed right, IMO. I find myself using my browser to read reddit a lot more than my aggregator. For example, it's hard to capture the action on a comment thread, or to create filtered feeds by user. Here's one idea:

http://features.reddit.com/info/xjvr/comments

If user-specific feeds are infeasible (for server bandwidth or computation reasons) it seems RSS feeds are low-priority.
I'd like to see an "announcements/feedback" section where people can tell this community about their projects and get comments back, i.e. similar to what happens (less formally) at Joel Spolsky's "Business of Software" forum.
Keep the Faith
I think comments are where the action is. Three simple things that get most of the bang of markdown IMO: Working permalinks for comments, paragraph dividers and clickable links.
maybe allow people to add a short, one-line description for each submission, so one has more more info to decide whether to check it out or not.
Why not submit a blog post the normal way? Is this a separate kind of post?
Its interesting to me that everyone here seems to have advice to offer, some of it very personally critical, to a man who is merely outlining his own train of thought, not telling anyone to follow his path. I am nearing the end of my fourth year in physics grad school and have never been closer to quitting. My own experience has been very isolating-I work long hours in the basement of a lab, limiting of my personal growth-I've been in a kind of 'stasis' where I'm in this college environment but very clearly do not fit the mold of a college student, and professionally frustrating - not only do I not have the kind of control over my project which people claim as the holy grail of a Ph.D., there is no clear end in sight to what I am doing. The only thing keeping me here is momentum and fear. Here is a man who just took his life off the usual path and spat in the face of fear. That deserves respect.
if only that were really true. y'all never been to a silicon valley singles thing, huh? all the ladies are lining up to bang the bartender.
marking a comment up or down should use ajax- especially so browser history is preserved (pressing the back-button to get to the front page). I assume comments can be marked into the negative range for those hopefully rare occasions where it's needed? [please don't test it on me!]. Other than that I love the minimalism.
How about an area where we can submit startup advice and vote on it, for example: "don't use bank of america for your business banking", "do incorporate as a C corp in delaware", etc. I think the advice submitted and comment threads generated could be quite valuable.
haha "that's cheating".

interesting idea re the video though i think the best benefit from the speakers is being able to talk to them afterwards and ask questions/generally chat about what you're doing.
Good content. Thank you BioGeek.
1. Change the color of the "comment" link please (or use a button). At first, I wondered why all those messages had the word "comment" in them :) And then I tried to respond to this message and searched for the "comment" button and I was enlightened!

2. Document before writing new features :) I'm really curious to know what the "showdead" option is (I don't want to try it because the name is so scary).

3. A URL (or free text) field in the profile.

4. Keep it simple. I think it's nearly perfect as it is (the sign-in form is great).

5. We want to see Arc and the source code of this app :)
Please don't. I vote for the simple, straightforward design you currently have.
There's risk and then there's prudent risk. Taking a 12 month sabbatical to focus on the startup would be a prudent risk. And, it's going all the way, just for 12 months. If you don't know in 12 months if the business will succeed, it probably won't (especially in this space). Anyway, I wish the guy lots of luck and success. I supposed if he makes millions, he can always go back.
I know this is an early version and things are still a bit rough, but just for the record:

1) The number beside my user name (top of the page) is a bit confusing. At first I thought maybe it meant I had some sort of message waiting to be read, or perhaps that I'd made one comment, which didn't make sense because I'd just created the account. Perhaps a label before the number would clear things up: (karma: 1).

2) I didn't realize at first that the arrows were used for voting. The main page (http://news.ycombinator.com/) had only "up" arrows. I figured they were used to collapse/expand additional content, so I ended up inadvertently trying to vote for several arbitrary items (I hadn't created an account yet, so the votes didn't count - I don't think). Once I saw the "up" and "down" arrows together I got their purpose. Perhaps, instead of removing one (or both) of the arrows you could simply display a ghosted one? Or perhaps replace the arrows with thumb up/down icons?

3) "7 points by pg 1 hour ago | 7 comments" reads like you (pg) added 7 points an hour ago. Is this meant instead: "7 points | by pg | 1 hour ago | 7 comments"?

New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the
4) Tell me there's a character limit, and what that limit is :)

New feature: Why not combine the scoring with Flickr like tags. Instead of just being limited to increasing/decreasing an items karma, give me the option of increasing/decreasing tags, and the ability to add a new tags of my own which others could then vote on. This would probably be a good feature for Reddit as well. They could do away with the handful of subreddits they have and use this tagging scheme instead.
Well, people tend to dislike it if you submit your own blog posts (you're biased, too wordy, trumpeting your own horn, etc.).

So this would be a place to hold virtual design reviews: ask people to look and provide objective feedback; the comments thread would function as the Q&A part between the hacker and the community of reviewers.
Marketplace Wanted; Web Site for Sale
Add in URL based duplicate recognition.
There should be a page which lists the submissions that have recently been commented on. Otherwise, it's essentially meaningless to make thoughtful comments on old threads.

Having a *hide* option would be welcome too.
For the time being, I'd settle for just converting newlines to br's. Adding hyperlinks before there's solid infrastructure for dealing with spam would be a mistake. I'll be surprised if more than few days go by before spam shows up, even without hyperlinks.
I got the impression from James's post that he wasn't actually "giving up" his millions, he was locking up all future profits in the business and reinvesting them. He converted HotOrNot from an S-corporation to a C-corporation. You can certainly reinvest profits from an S-corporation into the business or pay out profits from a C-corporation as dividends, but the incentives go different ways. S-corp earnings are taxed as ordinary income (none of the double-taxation of corporate profits) and S-corps can't give out different classes of shares, so there's an incentive to distribute the profits out to the shareholders. C-corp earnings are taxed once at the corporate level and then once as dividend earnings, yet they can have multiple classes of shareholders. The incentive is to build up the business and eventually seek an IPO, acquisition, or other liquidity event.

It almost looks like James is positioning HotOrNot to get big and get bought.
Please let users add a few words about themselves on their userpages. It's a useful way to learn a little more about an interesting commentator. And isn't that the main purpose of the site? Links to homepages can of course be useful too.
For anyone who hasn't seen Barry Schwartz' presentation at Google, in my humble opinion it is absolutely essential education for startups. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6127548813950043200
It actually starts to get into the math of how decisions are made. Invaluable.
I did the first 7 semesters of my undergrad in physics, and still have a lot of friends doing Ph.Ds in physics. A bachelors in physics opens up a large expanse of possibilities - finance, management consulting, economics consulting, computer programming, high school math teacher, and of course physics grad school. A Ph.D in physics qualifies you for exactly one job: physics professor. There are far more opportunities for a physics drop-out than a physics Ph.D, particularly for someone who doesn't absolutely, positively love the subject.
Possibility to delete comments and submissions.
I've tried this service on my Nokia and it's impressive!
first impression i got was that they spammed me like 6 months after I signed up. not god
I think this is a great idea. It would let things like slashdot's "funny" and "insightful" happen organically. I've been toying with doing something similar for a political blog for a while.
1. AJAX for the voting arrow(s); 2. RSS; 3. Search
- Some way to mark as read/downvote/hide. I prefer to be able to go through the "new" section and do this.

- Comment history in profile.

- "Best of" history.

- This is a silly little thing, but make the X comments/discuss link larger. I usually go down the page and open that page for any interesting article in a new tab.

- Someway to format posts so ones like this don't look silly and return to the main page thread after editing.
So, the community that talks a lot about startups is a good idea, but taking community advice directly seems a little iffy. It may be that this group happens to be mostly composed of people who could successfully run a startup, but I doubt it, and if it were true, it certainly wouldn't last very long. If you take any random set of people interested in startups, it's not likely that a majority of them would vote up the right pieces of advice. I prefer the more general submit-links-and-comment model, since the links tend to be more useful data than pure advice.
bookmarklet!

I would submit more links if there was a bookmarklet that submitted the page I was on.
Is there anyone doing case studies of *unsuccessful* internet startups? The successful ones are helpful, but it's easy to fall prey to survivorship bias, i.e. there's no guarantee that any commonalities have to do with them being *successful* rather than *internet* or *startups*. A group of unsuccessful startups would be a nice control group, and maybe then we could draw some better conclusions about what makes a startup successful.
He used the assignment operator instead of the equality operator -- is the fact that choices are headaches *all Joel Spolsky's fault*?
wouldn't it be simpler to just decide that it's ok to submit your own posts? some people have done that already and it seems fine to me: they're among the best links here.
Mike Volpe: Are startup valuations really rising?
Possible Major Google Announcement Tomorrow
Spam actually showed up the first day. Fortunately we already had good tools for dealing with it.
[PDF] LiveJournal's Backend: A history of scaling