skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1,2,3, whatever man. I don't want to embarrass you, but no matter how many users you have, with this site you should not pretend to be a pro:

a) Fake small caps, creating weird stairs in the underline
b) Passive white space everywhere
c) Random picture placement
d) Dozens of font sizes
e) Justification chaos, random spacing
f) Plenty of useless design elements,
g) Obvious silliness (like what you do with your signature)

If you really knew about typography, you'd take this nightmare offline right now.
"Business types" are not necessary.

What is necessary is the presence of someone who really understands people. Your product is destined to be used by people; so make sure that someone on your team has an interest in truly understanding your users and the other people that you will have to deal with.
Yeah, it's great work.
My, how things have changed. I love that entire section:

...A computer on which to develop software ($3000)...

...Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your credit card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen. But catalog companies may believe that a secure link is necessary...

...At present Webgen has only a 28.8kb connection. This will serve in the initial stages, when we have few clients....
We had a major power outage in the Seattle area in December '06 and some areas didn't come back for 12 days (mine was 6). I met my partner at a grocery store while picking up firewood and somehow we talked about how our lives were dependent on computers and the internet :-P. That evening we started poker nights with a few friends where we bounced ideas. Finally, when I was working on my idea and the 2 people working with me QUIT, I was telling him about how hard it was to find a co-founder! And to my surprise, he offered to work on it....now we exhibit great teamwork! Just like the founders of Google, our Bachelors is from Univ. of Maryland and Univ. of Michigan ... LOL
Cool site, it'd be nice if you had more robust geographic search capabilities.

Google maps integration would be awesome.
The above code isn't working anymore, please try this one: YAZJZ3. Let us know what you think!
No, that note seems to imply that there were other angels (not YC) who had convertible debt.
When I started a summer project, I used facebook advertising and campus flyers to find potential partners.

I ended getting ~15 hackers interested in working on the project over the summer, interviewed 10, and picked two.

We all worked an lived together in the same apartment. It was probably the best summer of my life, and cost us about $2,000 / person. Most of that was for food & rent.
Is this author trying for that? Speaking as the author, I can say that I am not fishing for anything except for intelligent debate ;)

Your argument about finding a better product, however, is a bit off. History is littered with better products and better companies getting relegated to the proverbial dustbin. After all, if it was true, Apple, or even Amiga, would have been King decades ago.

t @ dji
the only issue i take with this article is the following (and its an issue that, when i hear someone say it, it almost immediately calls everything else into question about their logic and reasoning): not everyone can get broadband. not everyone can AFFORD broadband. get your head out of the Valley, out of San Fran, out of Austin or California or New York city, and go ANYwhere in Everywhere, USA, or Anywhere Else, Rest-of-the-World, and you'll see that broadband is either insanely prolific or utterly non-existent, government-funded or tough-to-afford for the working class, and a complete scattershot congregation of technologies, hardware and security.
Friends of friends... put it out there to anyone/everyone you know that you're looking for someone with x background or x skills. Let your network do the work. It worked for me!
is it just me/my browser/whatever, but all those links to his success series seem to load right to his latest blog posting...

I've tried in safari/opera/firefox. All are redirecting to his mainpage. grrrrrrrrrr time to break out the ole IE for one last attempt.
Maybe this is just me being slow, but it took me a few minutes to figure out where the Start a Wamily button was. It would have helped me if, for example, ". . . add your own" (below the featured Wamilies) was a link. Just a thought. Looks very cool though, and I'm definitely reminded of Ning.
Speaking to a microsoftie this evening about all this and another lightbulb went on -- one of the things hobbling Microsoft is its historical focus on the partner as the channel for connecting with customers. Think about it -- how often do you buy a Microsoft product directly from Microsoft? Never? You always buy it through someone else, through the "channel" -- which might be a reseller, a var, or an oem. This disconnection from the customer is killing microsoft in the NEW world...
Back in high school I used to get small freelance projects. Every now and then I would subcontract it. And I subcontracted one of the coding projects through a rentacoder.com to what later turned into my partner. We just connected really well and shared a passion to launch new things.

We've done quite a few ventures together in past 4-5 years with MSN chat being our only line of communication:) If we get into YC he'll be flying up to US and hey we might actually finally meet.
Risky Marketing Can be Smart Marketing
That's a neat approach in that it's something that can be repeated - of course the exact response may vary depending on the nature of your uni.
Paul realizes that he cannot win by predicting market dynamics. Instead, this is his shot at shaping it.
Now Don Dodge is writing about Paul's essay
divia, thanks for the feedback. we're definitely listening to what our alpha users have to say -- Nate (co-founder of Wamily)
Might be true if you live in "Silicon Valley lead shielding" talking only with startup guys.
Completely wrong outside.
How many people know Y-combinator? Here you are...
"Sorry to burst your bubble but it was never Microsoft's intent to scare anyone. Microsoft has a huge partner network of over 80,000 companies who enjoy working with Microsoft."

Eh. I personally didn't enjoy working with Microsoft. Strange mix of arrogance and mediocrity.
Maybe Paul should have called it Microsoft: The Big Friendly Giant.
If I were building a gmail, I'd be using a maildir-derivative.
well what did microsoft do way back, they bought hotmail for millions from sabeer bhatia. Now what happened? hotmail is still way behind Gmail and yahoo mail. Did they improve that? NO. That shows 0 creativity or understanding of things. Only thing MSFT is good at is putting nice colors and popping things here and there and calling it cool tech. Inane people dont see that for this cool thing they are putting pressure on hardware, RAM guzzler cool things eh?
At the top of the Wiki, have two text boxes, with the first one editable, and the second automatic:

Wiki [UserEnteredTitle] [http://wamily.com/wiki/username/UserEnteredTitle.html]

Then, non-members can see the text without any fuss.

Now that I think about it, I don't see any way to easily link to my homepage:

http://wamily.com/username/
Hilarious! Yes, I have seen this way too many times. Great find!

Here's a personal account of ball of mud code:

(from my comment on http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2007/04/07/how-to-wreck-your-brand/ )

I worked with them [Sony] on the development of their http://musicstore.connect.com/ site that was their attempted 'iTunes Store killer' (just saying that makes me chuckle). Wow, what a mess. Talk about spaghetti code that had mushroomed into a giant ball of mud. It was way over budget and took much longer than anyone anticipated. And a year later, it still only supports Internet Explorer and Windows.

My take on what went wrong in this instance: they did not manage complexity.

They let it grow and grow and did not believe that 'code debt' was a reality. It soon took 10 times longer to make even the simplest changes because of the very poor state of the code.

I have seen this happen at several companies and it's usually the same story. There are B and C level coders that don't understand the dangers or code complexity or code debt and thus create loads of both. The A level coders that do understand this try to explain the growing problem to management. The management doesn't know any better, so they see code cleanup as a needless expense that will only slow down rolling out new features and so they side with the B and C level coders. Of course, the irony is that development will eventually crawl to a near halt because the code is undecipherable. Along the way the A level coders get so frustrated with the state of the code base that they leave the company for greener pastures. This is the critical turning point since the B and C level coders will only hire other B and C level coders - and the project will die a slow death as the cycle continues.
In Java, I have used Prevayler in a previous project (about 2 years ago), and I really liked it:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/prevayler/

The reason I'm not using it right now is because Hibernate makes OO mapping so easy and trivial that I honestly don't see the need. But it still a good solution if using a DB is an overkill.

I believe there's a Prevayler port for Ruby.
I really don't get the hype about Ajax etc. This (and maybe the younger ones are lacking this knowledge) effect could be done since the mid 90s.

In those days, you eithr used a frameset with a hidden frame to get the update stuff from the server and put it into the browser via DOM access. Or, to stay with MS, you could use a hidden IFRAME.

Really no rocket science... so, the killer apps these days are small, simple and FAST desktop apps (whatever desktop people use). We will see...
Word of the day: Passion
:)

My experience with graphic design is mainly in the traditional realm, not on the web. I never claimed to have the ultimate typography on my website. (To give you an idea of my age, I programmed a BBS in basic on a commodore 64 "Moondog BBS" in 1982 - I was a Junior in HS.) However, the site was cutting edge when I first had it on in 1995 and was published a few years in a row in the book _Design Portfolio_ with interviews, etc. in the late 90's.

My site has been neglected as I've been too busy (too many projects, etc.), but the thrust of the site is the imagery and design and ideas, not the fonts. That is the value people get from the site and why it is so heavily linked and visited. I am definitely looking forward to having the site totally automated and database driven so that I can control the look and feel globally (the site is huge if you noticed) and have it always up to date finally later in the year.

But to take it off because of imperfect fonts and frames etc. would be foolish. I would be denying the value that so many people are getting from the site in its current crippled form. But thank you for the concern :)
The one sentence that stood out the most to me from this article was "Pick your hill to die on."

Life's too short to work on something meaningless, a reminder to myself that nothing is more important than working towards your passion. I can see myself old, and on my death bed, regretting not taking the chance to change the world. And that, scares me.
Wow. Congratulations PG, you have Microsoft on the defensive!
Latency is fine, I think, and gets better all the time.

The browser is a fantastic platform. You never have to install web apps. You never have to patch web apps. And you are automatically connected through the client-server paragidm that proved to be so wonderful before desktops ever came about.

Remember, dumb terminals were around long before PCs.
"Strange mix of arrogance and mediocrity."

Those things tend to correlate positively.
Old news! I've been using Linux since 1993, been involved in startups since 1999, and about the last time that I paid any attention to Microsoft was when they launched .NET (around 2003). In fact, the .NET implementation (a belated catch-up in many ways to Java) was about the only semi-innovative development effort I have seen come out of MS in the last 10 years. Even so, it was little more than a tarted-up virtual machine, a cleaned-up set of Java-equivalent programming APIs, and a couple of cool features like crypto-signed DLLs, a global assembly cache (hmm - where do you put all your JAR files, then?!) and the ability to mix and match programming languages in a single application (though only one target language per DLL, or more strictly, per .NET "assembly").

Then, Miguel and the gang came along and wrote Mono, and pretty much re-implemented everything of value from .NET, without the licencing overheads of running in a windoze only environment. That basically took the wind out of the sails for Microsoft, and they've been floating around, almost impassive, pretty much just watching the emergence of ASP/SaaS computing, web 2.0, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, blogging, wikipedia, bittorrent, skype, asterisk and everything else from the sidelines ever since.

I think the real problem comes back to people. It's a bit like Paul's articles on Great Hackers and what motivates them. I know plenty of great hackers (and I would like think that a couple of startups later I am at least a good one! - though I find myself more and more on the business side in recent times, growing our company and developing our people - good young hackers themselves). I even used to know a few guys at Microsoft (Australia and Singapore). The last "good" person that I knew who went to Microsoft (from a PhD programme at Melbourne Uni) joined in 2002. Since then, nobody I know even went near the place. If you can't attract great people, then you won't build great products, and everything else is a forgone conclusion. Microsoft has built great cash-cow businesses, and great fortunes for its founders, but I don't believe it will ever be a player again.
I often wonder what Don Dodge does at MS.... he's supposedly in Emerging Business and yet he's often way off the mark and he spends an inordinate amount of time writing blog posts. I think he's actually in PR/Evangelism section... I often question his credibility when I find a link to one of his posts.

He completely missed the PG's main point that no one is afraid of MS anymore. He's pointing to revenues and yet he fails to mention MS's abysmal share performance. Come on Don, at least read more than the title next time.
I recently moved my homepage from daniel.franke.name to http://dfranke.us with a 301 redirect and no change in content. The result was that it took Google a few weeks to notice the move, but at no point was my page not the #1 result when you googled my name.
I realize that it appears the same way on the article and you probably just copy-pasted, but please don't post article titles in all-caps.
You've got to be an idiot to think Microsoft is dead. Ever seen WPF/e? Photosynth? Xbox 360? Virtual Earth 3D? Not to mention the framework for 90+% of computers and one of the biggest R&D initiatives of any private company. Then there's that little $60 BILLION nestegg sitting in the bank waiting for new oppotunities.

Is there even one synapse in your whole head firing? You've got to be cold stupid to think they're dead.
Same here. The other programs look interesting and all, but I'm not willing to move to another country for anything but the best.
I think user experience can and will be duplicated. I did post a link to an SVN front-end that has a very similar interface. Maybe the competitors are locked-in to some bad design decisions and can't quite recreate the same user experience... but that's a little optimistic.

Anyway you slice it, you need to have a profit margin. And with a commodity like storage (and the soon-to-be commodity of online storage), you have to be competitve with market prices. The reason that most YC startups can worry about user adoption is because they aren't tied down to this problem. They aren't really making commodities and the cost of makign the product isn't so suffocating.

That's why Dropbox needs to plan for moving off S3. There is so much innovation in storage backends... so much research to read. Think of Google Filesystem. It makes storage very very very cheap.

Here's a good plan for Dropbox. Use S3 as a secondary solution. The primary storage should be local to them (servers running a filesystem that takes advantage of unique properties of the workload... like Google does). When it fills up, traffic thereafter is handled by S3 instead. Then, they can relax in worrying about and scaling local storage. They can take their time buying more hardware, and rolling out software changes to the storage system. They can migrate the data from S3 to local storage at will. And now, their customers can be charged a flexible price, because they control their own expenses. In other words, think of S3 as "datacenter outsourcing".

But this might be too long-term... it might be something to worry about post-YC.

But I think it might be easy to build a storage implementation that runs local and exposes the same exact interface as S3. And, poof, we just abstract the whole backend away, and just flip a switch when we want to go one way or the other. And it reduces latency. Then you go after zero-downtime data migration from S3 to your local systems... which can be done I think... and I think you would be happy.
"I mean, there is a whole industry developed around databases, they must add value..."

The traditional RDBMS adds random access by computed criteria, transaction safety, multi-threadedness, a standard query language, ...

If you don't need these, you're likely to suffer a performance hit / programming overhead compared to a system that does not offer them. A filesystem only offers random access by one key (pathname).

Also, the more specialised your needs are, the further down the stack you should start your own code. For a simple web application with a bit of user data, I would probably go with a DB. For your own search engine, you probably want something a little more customized, building on top of a standard fs.
Microsoft makes more money than any Y Combinator startup ever will. Bill Gates is off saving the world with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, while PG is busy exploiting young talent.
Hmm, seem to have hit a nerve here. I can't imagine anyone would have reacted so angrily if I'd said Microsoft was dead in 1995. They would have just laughed it off then. Because it wasn't true then.
First internet worm is created by Robert Morris, co-founder of ycombinator
Survival and success are two different things. The 50% PG referred to are for the founders becoming "rich" by their standards, not just staying in business.
Fortunately it was 11:47 pm when I read this.
I think it's kinda lame how everyone goes over there and bashes the poor guy about "Duh Microsoft is dying" or "Paul is right!" or "You can't control the Internetz!!!"

Please, this is a well paid executive. He has business meetings with other executives, oversees the big transactions. Paul may very well be right about the future of our industry, of the Internet...

The problem is not that Microsoft is not feared, or that they are not agile, or even that they are not aware. I don't think they really even care. As long as the Citigroup's and other GIANT Fortune 50 companies are buying MS products, they will be in the green for decades to come.

The fact that they are interested at all in what we like/think warrants some credit, however little we collectively may give them. I like to keep it in perspective, it's just a software company after all.
He's filling in for Scoble.
With 60,000+ employees it's fairly easy to offend somebody.
why? Maybe for replication.
Paul, have you heard anything about enterprise software? :)
BLS you are missing a point. Money isnt the only thing at stakes. You need good mentors, advisors and backing of them to actually built a sturdy one. This $15k or $20k isnt what one wants, it works the other way, we are using YC/PG et al to learn few things we dont know. They are giving you one complete solution of taking idea to reality. The money you borrow from parents, friends et al wont come with that help. Plus YC isnt saying that u sign up for life with us, they are showing you a way by teaching you priceless things for nothing. Even if they take 99% of equity, 1% comes with 100% experience and happiness to have achieved something. Plus for some one smart, this isnt the ONLY IDEA, this is just a beginning :)
Iocaine Powder: A Champion Roshambo AI Dissected
oh ok. Well the model will be cool if an user can stream songs for others to listen. Say buy rights for the song and if someone has to listen to same, he can request trade or buy the song for airing it. This way he or she recovers money and could be something worth. rather than paying 99 cents and owning it and listening for few days...one can trade it and find ways to earn back 10 times :D
Well with the amount of fees i shelled out in here, buying a computer, installing linux and learning it wasnt easy. So had to go for computers provided by schools with no admin rights :(
Awesome I'm a big big fan of the BHAG.
RMS, This is my viewpoint, i have always gone for either best or nothing, just like 1 or 0, there isnt any thing in between. I stand by what i say, even though i have no proof to show or say that i applied to YC and no where else. But i am honest in saying what i practice.
I'm pretty sure that the way you're framing the debate doesn't help. Literally speaking, "Microsoft is dead" just isn't true - as Don says, they're actually still growing - it's their second derivative that's screwed. Nobody cares about Vista, the 360 is about to be knocked off the throne by the Wii, the Zune is irrelevent, opearting systems are steadily becoming a commodity and not just because of web apps. I agree with it all, except I really question your choice of words.
Well when i said PG, i meant PG + Team at YC. As long as i get advice from ppl at YC, i would be glad
LOL people snooping on PG and reading the contents? Well this only shows that they could better spend that time in building better things
Hi Sam,
thanks for your comment and be sure this is on the way :)