skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Am I the only one who liked my summer jobs? I've had one all but two summers, since my junior year of high school. They were (grr, I wish news.YC had Markdown...):

1999: Did a website for a local town newspaper

2000: Worked for an all-teenage venture funded dot-com (yeah, it was that easy to come by funding during the bubble).

2001: InstallShield scripting for said dot-com's parent company. (2000/2001 bookended a "gap year" between high school and college, so I was working there all year, with various projects.)

2002: Worked for a contract programming shop.

2003: Summer off - spent it learning Lisp and Dylan, attempting the ICFP programming contest (didn't finish), starting an Eclipse plugin for Dylan (didn't finish), and designing the database schema for FictionAlley.org (eventually did finish, but it wasn't till 2005).

2004: Worked for a financial software startup that eventually became my full-time employer.

2005: Summer off. Spent it finishing up FictionAlley.org. Well, that and going on a cruise.

If I had to rank the years from best to worst, it would probably be 2000, 2001, 1999, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2005. Two of the three worst were the years that I had no job, while all of the best involved a job of some sorts.

I suspect it's because when I had an internship, I spent the summer learning new technologies, which is exactly the same thing I would've been doing without an internship. However, with the internship, I a.) got paid b.) usually completed a project or 3, and c.) had people around me. When I was working on my own stuff, none of those were a given.
Official Google Blog: Google Book Search becomes more comprehensive
+ The comments count ("5 comments") isn't a link to the comments, unlike most sites, so that's unintuitive.

+ The error message "Phrase Erorr!" had me cracking up because I'm pretending it's intentional?

+ Everything is a bit too dark for this computer's dimming LCD.

+ Signup text inputs should probably have a maxlength attribute to reduce resubmissions. Not for security of course. It'd be neat if signup was identical to the way login works.
This has come up before

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4043
I think you need to get out of this mode of thinking "hm.... what kind of SELECT statement you can run on a table and turn it into HTML"

Focus on PROBLEMS that need to be SOLVED. Finding what's going on around is not a problem anymore. Have not been for like what... 10 years?
2 weeks after launch, and no real traffic. What should I do?
How about this:
- You ask a visitor: "what is your name"
- He says "Bob"
- You generate AJAX page that says "Hi, Bob!"

How's that?!
After months of after-work-hours programming, I launched my site http://www.mygrub.net but haven't seen any traction. Any tips for getting traffic? How did reddit get its very first users?

I applied to YCombinator with this, but was rejected. Maybe for good reason =(
"Ever wanted to keep track of all the great restaurants you've been to?"

The answer is NO. This is why you dont' have any visitors. Is it so hard to accept that ppl dont' give a rat's a$$ about "blogging" about stuffing themseves with food?

People like to talk about THEMSELVES. This is what drives social network sites.
Go Ahead: Push the Red Button
Are vertical search engines finished  with Google's new Universal Search?
Im taking the weekend off

I've learnt from experience that you should take the time off before shipping the app. That way you're there to gather the feedback, do the bugfixes. Then try to do a second release within a week with a few little extra features that have been requested to show the community you listen to them.

Nice site, keep up the good work.
http://yelp.com
That does seem pretty out of left field. Maybe the new moderation policy is "keep them guessing".
Hi edawerd, reddit creators created :) fake contents in early stage to have something on their site.
This is a very niche site. I would think that the type of people that would be into this service would be (mostly) over the age of 35. What type of marketing/market research have you done for your target demographic? Do you have an advertising campaign set up to reach your target?

You have to realize that the kind of people that would like to share restaurant experiences are probably not the same type of people who enjoy discovering the latest web 2.0 website just because it has been launched two weeks ago.
More Firefox Bloat? Say It Ain't So, Mozilla
I completely agree. This is a feature I would love to see in more languages, as it's such a no-brainer optimization that just about any language could benefit from its use.
Less posting, more coding! ;)
Scribes' powerful code editing experience in action.
Allison Stokke what a startup can learn from a pole vaulter is startup like an Olympic championship?
http://teenwag.com good job
I like the color scheme, actually. I am quite partial to the color scheme because I agree with Maddox (though I don't read his site much anymore) that looking at a white background is basically the same thing as staring as a light bulb. If the entire Internet used dark backgrounds, it would be a much warmer experience, in my opinion.

That said, perhaps the text needs to be just slightly lighter in order to give it a little more contrast with the background. Also, the size is minuscule. I know that Ctrl-+ is not too hard to press, but if that's the first thing that every visitor has to do, it's kind of a waste of time. On my display, at least, the size of event titles is about the same size as the normal text on this site. I would personally increase the size by 25-50%, but I tend to like larger text, so take that recommendation with a grain of salt.

I agree with the other comments that the front page should have a little bit more useful information. It could be something like a list (in order of decreasing popularity) of the events that are happening that day. The search seems somewhat strange, because if I was using that site, I think it would be in a situation where I'm like, "Hmm... what am I going to do tonight?" not a situation where I already know what I want to do and just want to figure out when it is happening (although that is a legitimate use case as well).

In spite of the criticisms, I'm liking the idea, and I wish you the best of luck with it. Have you considered trying to tie it into e.g. Google Calendar so that people can easily add events? Of course, ideas like that are just added features, but I'm curious where you plan on going with this.
well we have a navigation bar http://teenwag.com for the last 2 days
find teenwaggers there http://teenwag.com wearing black ruby on rails tshirts
I think it's just a sign of how desperate the press is for any story. Especially in the Tech Crunch example you gave, the article was really pretty much filler, in my opinion, and by throwing any small thing in there, they were able to make it a little bit larger.

Also, you have to remember that the more traditional press companies are used to the corporate programming atmosphere, where any proposed change has to go through several levels just to get approved. In this case, even if the programming takes less than an hour, it's probably anywhere from a day to a week of work to go from idea to product. Yes, this is absurd, but it is what the press is used to, so any small change is interesting to them, because they might not consider that it only took a trivial amount of time to put in place.
Why would someone use this instead of Facebook or upcoming?
I still don't have a laptop, and I don't tend to listen to music in headphones. I have about a 20-minute walk to class, and I find that it's either relaxing, to just walk and not do anything else, or I'm deep in thought, considering the day's lecture topics, project ideas, implementation ideas for a current project, or any number of other things.

I have often found myself disappointed that so many people are wrapped up in technology and oblivious to the world around them. I think that if more people allowed themselves some downtime, everyone would be a lot less stressful and more friendly.
I guess you've never used yelp. Or read one of the many popular food blogs.

tx: just b/c you don't want something doesn't mean no one does.
"What type of marketing/market research have you done for your target demographic?"

What kind of market research can you do on a shoestring budget?
This food social site is quite popular in Italy:

http://www.duespaghi.it/
Every time I hear someone mention shriram's book I regret not taking his class when I had the chance.
This seems to me to be a pretty special case. I would hope that in the same situation, I would realize that giving 2/3 of a company to a casual friend and her friend (that I don't know) means losing control.

In a situation where you have 3 good friends, I would expect that to work out well, because any 2-sided disputes could be resolved democratically without much fuss.
Cool. Did you use web.py to make this?
Quite right. I love yelp. Visit it regularly, for all sorts of reviews.
As Aston pointed out, it looks a lot like yelp. I can see you've tried to differentiate it with the "food blog" thing, and all...but I think those changes make it less interesting than yelp rather than merely differentiated.

Don't get me wrong, it looks really nice--nice design, cool features with the maps and all. Looks like you've executed well, but with maybe a somewhat weak idea. It can probably be flipped over into something cool. You just need to figure out what...

And you will need more content, as another said. Until someone comes to your site and gets value out of it, they won't feel compelled to pay it forward with a contribution of their own.
Food is a niche? Everybody eats...Most people prefer to eat good food rather than crap food.
Maybe they should call the Scribd guys, they're doing more traffic than I thought: http://snapshot.compete.com/scribd.com+twitter.com
The article phrases it in a way as if to indicate that Firefox has to choose between being slim and having good (meaning bug-free) plug-ins. Why not have official Firefox-supported add-ons, distinguished from those made by users, which add functionality such as spell-checking and page-caching? These add-ons could even be included in the default installation, with the ability to remove them if desired.

If they did this, the core of Firefox would be slim, with additional functionality provided by plug-ins, just like the original vision, and all the great functionality that has been added lately would not be sacrificed.
is the problem that they don't like the idea, or aren't willing to give up their day job?

if the latter, i've seen pg's essays (either why to not not start a startup, how to make wealth, how to start a startup, whatever) and better yet jessica's book (founders at work) serve as a serious kick in the ass to people in cushy day jobs at ms and google; a few of my friends quit are now in this summer's yc program.

if pitching the idea isn't going well, i've found that giving potential team members problems to solve ("hey, how could this be made to scale to x members" or "what features should be put into the first version" -- whatever, the specific problem isn't the point) gets people going (and as a bonus lets you see if they give smart answers) and 1) makes them feel a sense of ownership/participation in the project and 2) opens the door to nudges like "yeah, these are the kinds of problems we'd be solving!" i've found this kind of end-around persuasion is better than arguing or trying to tackle objections head on (people love to buy; they hate to be sold.)
Blogs of startup founders
I thought it would be really cool to have a list of all the blogs of people running startups - people who are talking about, and sharing, their experiences. Here are a few I know:

Harj Taggar (Auctomatic): http://mealticket.wordpress.com/
Kul Taggar (Auctomatic): http://kulveer.co.uk
Pairwise: http://blog.pairwise.com
Xobni: http://xobni.com/blog
Crowdstorm: http://blog.crowdstorm.com
YC startup Auctomatic looking to hire
No. The problem isn't that juwo is a "new concept." In my opinion, your response to the previous post is demonstrative of your problem:

He said: "I don't understand what your product is."
You said: "juwo has X functionalities and Y use cases."
You didn't say: "juwo is a product that solves __(problem)__ for __(audience)__ by __(10 words max describing functionality)__."

_That_ is what people want to know when they ask about your product. _That_ is what needs to be on your home page, not 13 use cases and 300k of screenshots. For a product to be successful, it has to have a purpose. It has to solve a problem that somebody has.

I've been following your threads on news.yc for weeks, and I still have no idea whether your product has an actual purpose or is a useless collection of features. If the former, you need to do a much better job of communicating this to people. Otherwise, it's time to revisit the idea. Nobody's interested in a pile of useless features. And if you don't believe me, perhaps I could interest you in my tax prep software which organizes your photos and generates source code for text-based adventure games for the TI-83...
I hate that - I don't think it's quite dishonest, but it doesn't feel real, either. Unfortunately, I think it's also a good idea:-(

Edit - hate is too strong a word, but still, it annoys me - see below.
I found it handy to do a binary chop on my installed extensions. Turned out that only 2 caused any significant memory leaks, so I disabled them until they updated them and fixed the leaks.
reddit got its first users because Paul Graham linked to it. Remember it was a yc company. They were getting something like 3000 users a day in the first days. To me it seems that's the best reason to be a yc company, because you trade some share of your company to get free press and free traffic. Which is kind of expensive if you don't get it for free.

In your case I would perhaps consider finding a partner or something to link to you.
I couldn't read that text and had the most productive day ever! Is it just me or someone else also noticed that a black font on a brown background with little gray circles is not conductive of reading?
Edward - don't let the nay-sayers get you down. Here's a few pieces of advice. First of all, for all of the users who don't sign up and are merely there to look around and maybe catch some reviews, the site has no local focus.(I recently read somewhere that a typical site with user generated content can expect around a 10:1 ratio of readers to creators - so this group should be important to you). I'm not particularly interested in seeing a Google map of reviews from Connecticut when I'm in Portland Oregon. I feel like you would do well to pick one or two cities, and focus your resources on reaching critical mass in those markets. I think what you have is cool. Talk to your friends and enable them with digital cameras. A lot of people eat out once or twice a day and even a few of these people using your site will really rev up the user experience in a given city. After you have 100, maybe 200 reviews. Reach out to local bloggers, small local papers, and some of your favorite restaurant owners. Maybe even print up some info and go talk to some of the more interesting restaurants in your area. Restaurant owners love getting reviews, and many will be happy to speak your praises to their customers in hopes of a good review.
One last thing. When someone tells you that "people wont be interested in X", you need to seriously consider what they are really saying. For instance, "tx" says "is it so hard to accept that ppl dont' give a rat's a$$ about "blogging" about stuffing themseves with food? People like to talk about THEMSELVES. This is what drives social network sites." His claim that there isn't a mass appeal for restaurant blogging or reviews is legitimate. There probably inst. But there's definitely a market for consumption of that content, I won't even bother listing examples. He obviously doesn't know enough about content generation to understand the concept of power users and the influence they can have on a service like this. Anyway - You might even consider subsidizing meals
to help generate content in the beginning depending on your available resources. Goodluck!
Talking about tracking Web site traffic/trends with Compete.com -- ScobleShow [podcast, video]
I am guessing because fb is limited to private events generally and upcoming is still only really used by tech demographic (at least in London) and doesn't have a digg/reddit like voting structure.

I am also thinking he only did this idea to learn and test it out rather than as a serious business venture but then he should still have done a more unique concept since their are plenty out there....
Truemors: They say there's nothing new under the sun...
It reminds me of one problem that actually needs solving: have you ever worked for a company in a remote location, where takeaway is the only food you can get? There are usually loads of leaflets from takeaway restaurants lieing around, and it is hard to remember which ones were good, and which of their meals didn't suck. Maybe if your blog became more fine-grained (which menu did I choose), it could be used for that.
I still think the site should allow a comment with the URL otherwise, with popular threads, the initial explanatory comment can be pushed down into obscurity. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1149
New Scientist: Top 10 ways to make better decisions
With 27 you are still young - why don't you take that break now?
I like number 10 "Ask someone else".

I would add number 11: Flip a coin. Works for me :)
thats hilarious

edit: and probably not correct. The phrase has been thought about so much and repeated so often that I would think the negative would no longer be ignored, although on the first read it may have an affect of a Be Evil command. I never did get around to reading nlp books.
Adding a comment doesn't work because it can easily drift down the page. There needs to be a way to supply an initial comment with a URL that remains tied to it at the top of the page. It doesn't need to be votable.
The OP explanatory comment has drifted down the page by now. This feature request would be useful to stop this. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1149
Also, since Groovy came from nowhere, it's growth rate is basically infinite. If that trend continues, by next month every atom in the universe will have bought a Groovy book...
how about seeding events automatically from other bigger sites first?
Honestly, that's just the image I had, but I could be wrong. I was also inspired by Richard Hamming ``You and Your Research''

"Age is another factor which the physicists particularly worry about. They always are saying that you have got to do it when you are young or you will never do it. Einstein did things very early, and all the quantum mechanic fellows were disgustingly young when they did their best work. Most mathematicians, theoretical physicists, and astrophysicists do what we consider their best work when they are young. It is not that they don't do good work in their old age but what we value most is often what they did early. On the other hand, in music, politics and literature, often what we consider their best work was done late. I don't know how whatever field you are in fits this scale, but age has some effect."

I'm sure there are plenty of counter-examples, yes.
it can do about 5-8 different things. So there are about 13 use cases with demos listed

Pick one (compelling) thing and promote that, first and foremost.

If you start to get a user base, then you can gradually introduce some of the other features.

As a friend of mine said: "The Burton snowboard web site is the only reason I bothered to get Flash working in my browser".

You need to find a similar dynamic for juwo, otherwise people are not going to take the time to download or install anything.
The Nine Biggest Myths of the Workplace
Prototype and script.aculo.us
Colin's spot on. If they are truly co-founders and not just early employees with a lot of stock, they have to believe the idea is just as much theirs as it is yours.

I'm moving to SF soon hoping to team up with some co-founders. But I'm not going with any preconceived ideas of what kind of startup I want to pursue.
Google Universal Search - is Vertical Search Space Finished?
There was a lot more half baked features i took out cause i just wanted to put the site up with minimal bugs... U guys are the first people to see it
Yeah, the FAQ answer sort of hinted at this: "You will soon be able to control in the firefox extension what pages we are aware of."

http://hystry.com/faq.html

I visualize it as allowing either a whitelist of sites to send out or a blacklist of sites to avoid sending out. I'll bump this idea up my todo list.
Its supposed to be really fast and to the point to find events posted not by olny organizations, But events posted by individuals who are in the know....djs, bartenders, event promoters, etc... or if a you and/or a group of friends are hitting up a local bar or restaurant
Nope... Java (please dont stone me)
- comments link will be implemented

- i need to hire a witty copywriter

- i will bump up the contrast

- will add maxlenght to text input

sorry my replys sound short... Im reading and replying on my mobile phone

thank you very much for the feedback!
Will do... And probably will in addition to the regular login
100MB/mo compressed is just the text/html.
yeah i need to fix that... ive had no test users and limiting the functionality to the greater boston area
Ah, so you've tried it!

The html diff was harder than I expected (it has to handle comment permutations, for example) so I'm not surprised it has bugs. Can you point me to a specific URL, ideally one of the hystry.com/diff/ URLs? Much appreciated.
'... I was taught that Google's motto was a manifestation of negative consequentialism ...'

Sam thats too much thinking for me (grin).

Are we missing the point of the quote? The best example I've found why pb added 'dont be evil' to the list, was a jab at "their competitors". Pb suspected ( unsubstantiated ) them of "selling search results and mixing them in with real ones" (Founders at Work, Paul Buchheit, p170). Commercial gain through deception.

It was after all meant to be a (serious) joke. Especially Amit Patel, who pb quotes as writing 'dont be evil' on whiteboards, 'all over the building'.
There's Avi Bryant of dabbleDb.com at http://smallthought.com/avi/

And of http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/ of plentyOfFish.com at http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/
hmm...will think about it but im trying to get events of a different kind than what their users typically post
I imagine people are just going to your front page and then leaving, so what I would do is experiment with the front page to see if you can get better engagement. Focus on getting users to make the next click. Add a 'Add a Location' textfield on the front page, so that I can add a restaurant right away. Defer registration until after they typed in the review. Make it easier to browse restaurants, it doesn't seem easy to explore anything beyond what was recently added.

Also, the content doesn't seem very localized -- I entered my city and state, but it seems to default to California every time.

btw, you have a bug when adding locations with a quote in the name (search for Rhea's or Provino's). I added a couple of locations for you, good luck. You should make a follow up post (after you fix that bug) asking everyone to post at least one location for you. Or maybe you can turk it (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)?