skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
During high school some people wrote drafts of assignments and then made a "good copy" to hand in (it was high school, so busywork was common, I guess?) A teacher warned us that this is not going to work in university.

True enough, in university I quickly learned to get things right the first time - because I won't have time for a second try. It's a habit I've kept after I graduated.

I think the parallel to software is pretty obvious. It's easy to say "I'll rewrite this later", but when later rolls around, you have 3 other deadlines to meet. Throw-away code might still stay in the production code for 2 years. Refactoring parts of the code is good and necessary, but there are only so many resources you can dedicate to it.

I guess if you're seriously considering rewriting something from scratch, you're already caught between a rock and a hard place. Rewrite, and you miss an entire development cycle at least - time that could be spent enhancing or adding features. Stick with what you have, and you have to work with a codebase that makes development a nightmare (otherwise you wouldn't consider rewriting).

Better to avoid it if possible - do a bit of planning upfront, refactor when you can, have enough tests that refactoring is safe.

At my last job we rewrote a large part of the application - but it was done piecemeal, over two years, and never halted development or delayed new features. Refactoring was "snuck in" as part of deliverables whenever it was possible and safe. It was worth it because the new code performed up to 2 orders of magnitude better, and was much easier to work with - but we never would've been able to do it if we simply decided to drop everything and announce that we're rewriting the app from scratch.
Businesses on Facebook have revenue? ;-)
Buy, Rent, or Lease: Which Is Right for Your Small Business?
What Makes an Angel Invest?
The Perfect Presentation: Practice
Straight brainstorming I think the shower and before bed work the best for me.

A more deliberate technique that works for me is having people say "It would be neat if X existed -- but that's not possible." intentionally as a kind of idea challenge game.

The best ideas I've had were solutions to real-world problems or opportunities I noticed while doing real work.
Forget what everyone says, this is still one of my favorite shows on TV just for the entertainment and thrill factor. Besides, I don't think Les Stroud's background and past accomplishments can even compare to that of Bear Grylls.

Even if some parts of the show are dramatized or even fake, he is still an incredible person and his show is compelling.

It's interesting to note that lots of the tactics and ideologies portrayed on the show can be applied to entrepreneurship too, it's quite obvious but I hadn't thought of that yet. I guess I was too busy watching Bear eat a live frog or snake!
Personally, I've found that I come up with the best ideas or figure out how to solve problems when I'm not consciously thinking about it. Actively brainstorming gets me about 80-90% of the way there. The last 20 or 10 percent come when I walk away from the situation by taking a break. I guess subconsciously your mind is still thinking it through.
Stuff isn't really all that illiquid. Ebay and its ilk have created a reasonably efficient market for random junk. There's still a lot of overhead, though: writing the ad, monitoring the auction, and packing and shipping the item is time-consuming. No matter how good I got at it, it would probably still take $20 worth of my time. But if you're poor, it might still be worthwhile.
I was starting to get down about all this 'stuff'. Great Link.
Their business model is pretty unique; it doesn't really derive much from YC.
Absolutely! This past year I took the proceeds from all the lesser-used items and bought one pricey, high-quality, heavy-use item. It has completely paid off - I use the new computer (completely loaded iMac) constantly and it positively blows away any other computer I've owned. It does more for me in one week than all the junk I sold to buy it did for me in a year.

Which brings us to the subject of quality. I used to buy budget PC's - the cheapest thing I could find that would run what I needed. What a mistake that was. I have found that for heavy-use items it almost always pays to get the best I can possibly afford. I'm more likely to use higher-quality stuff and it performs better under heavy use.

There's a corollary to this: I have also found it preferable to buy the cheapest available product if it's a marginal or lesser-used item. Like a cheese grater or something. It's also good to question whether you need such an item at all, as you point out.
He makes a good point but I'm not a great fan of Edison. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison#Criticism
Thanks Fred, I'm glad that it's working well for you. (though obviously it's mostly due to the hard work of a lot of people who aren't me -- Gmail is a big project and I don't even work there anymore)
There are still countries where internet connection can go offline,from time to time, which makes online web applications risky.

I wonder all these web service providers considers this what i call "the cost of being offline".Let's say, my work 40 hr a week can afford being offline for 3-4 hours for an invoice web application where as in email, this will cost me much more.
Greed Is Good and Ugly
Yep - learning from there. Not just that, I want to set expectations right from the beginning. I'm not against Java, but generally with such a short timeframe i dont want to have .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby etc. developers all together and have them figure out which to pick. This will not work best for the startup as every developer will have their preferences and rightly so. This is something that needs to be right now and the right expectations need to be set and also so we have the right talent from the outset, no time to learn language intricacies here and no matter how good of a developer you are, you cannot be at full potential with a language you are using for the first time within 3 days.
:)
Great if we do. I just don't want people to limit their thinking to adaptations of popular services that already exist.
I truly prefer to buy adverbs at Lolly's. Love that place. Tremendously. They even have an "LY attachment" for my old adjectives.
To expand a bit on that: HitForge does share some aspects with YC but those aspects aren't what made YC special. Namely, YC wasn't the first investor of small monies in the seed stage or the first investor with technical insight. I'd say calling something a "YC clone" is meaningful if it does what YC was first at and the result is in large part a similar investor.

"The Hit Forge is a group of entrepreneurial engineers building mass-market web properties." What is YC? I think most people can't answer that clearly. To quote the home page: "Y Combinator is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage startups." That doesn't tell us new in what kind. I mean, incubator investors share such a description, but pg makes a point YC isn't one. But it's enough here to point out that, unlike YC, HitForge is some kind of a "co-operative" and if you fail your company you can still profit from the other companies.

What kind an investor is depends on who is the owner, why they invest, and how the ownership is implemented. The second part is what the investor does: what's the investment product, who are the customers, and how the operations are run. Answering these questions can take you a long way already.
Well, as the discuss link is somewhat important anyway, maybe it should be bigger :-)
i wonder if these advices applies to bookmarks as well.Where i have 5000 bookmarks to be read, look,store share but don't have time where my mind always echoes the importance and usefulness of these bookmarks i own.
The Best Billionaire How To Books
The best books for those interested in business strategies used by billionaires.
Correct, but I don't think most YC companies rely on that. And if most do, I'd bet it's around 55%. Loopt, Xobni, Heysan (yet), and Justin.tv all don't. And I don't think Zenter would've, either.. I can't see how text-based ads would be very useful while creating presentations.
Interesting that you should pick "sparse, uninteresting" as a qualifier for an example bad UI :-)
I apologize if someone has already mentioned this, but it seems to me that what you're proposing is to provide seed funding for marketing companies. By marketing companies, I mean companies that place product quality second to the marketing apparatus.

I have worked for several such companies, and at one time I was Information Coordinator for the American Marketing Association, so I've been exposed to a lot of marketing 'genius'. One thing I noticed time and time again in all these places is the prevalence of 'internal marketing'. When stripped of trendy buzzwords and platitudes about 'empowerment', internal marketing is a De facto ideology which stipulates that marketing is the primary driving force in every organization. It places product quality, customer value, and strategy in a distant secondary position.

The problem with marketing companies is that their myopic focus produces reactionary organizations - more ad hoc institutions than enterprises. 'Marketing companies' are sometimes profitable, but rarely maintain a commanding market position for long if they get there in the first place.

Contrast these with the real product companies of our time: Apple, Google, Craigslist, Facebook, Toyota. The real profit and value are being created by companies who focus on actual products. Some of these companies have little marketing apparatus at all, at least in the sense you're talking about.

This reminds me of a silly aphorism: You rob a bank because that's where the money is. Providing seed funding to 'marketing geniuses' is like robbing twenty hot dog stands and hoping that one of them forgot to deposit their earnings that week. It's only a good plan if you can't figure out how to rob the bank.
Woah, I just had a moment where I realized I was reading something by Paul Buchheit. For what it's worth, thank you, my first gmail invite came from someone who turned out to be my future co-founder. Check out ClutterMe.com if you haven't already.
... so that's why she wasn't poking me back.
Hmmm dunno much about that friend...
I agree with pg, go for it anyway.
Skype Case Study: From Idea to Lucrative Exit
The first thing I was asked by a non-YC incubator.

"How do you plan to acquire users?"
"I dunno, spamming" I reply.
"You should try facebook apps."

Second angel non-technie guy I was talking to...
"now something like facebook apps, that's what we could get behind."

Ok, fine. You're gonna get your stupid facebook apps. The point I want to make is that facebook apps now are like penny loafers in the 30's.

Wear the heck out of them now and have a couple to show off to your friends, but eventually they are going to be Sunday only dress. Popular, but only 1/7th of your wardrobe.

best.analogy.ever
Edison was the Bill Gates of his generation ;-)
Is it okay if I respond to you, and down vote at the same time?
I love knowing what he's reading and what inspires his thinking. I don't think these posts are in place of his original content, they're "extras". He's also well-aware that these posts aren't as popular. He mentioned his incoming traffic was way bigger with his original posts.
Thoughts on using SQLite?
Hey guys has anyone YCer use SQlite in a production environment? For as long as I can remember I've been using MySQL, and I want to know if SQLite is a viable replacement.
At a guess I would say most good developers will no longer willingly program in PHP, so you're likely selecting for the shallow end of the talent pool, more or less. Compound that with PHP essentially making it a sack-race next to other languages' ability to get out and run, and it's happy hour at Les Mediocres.
Disqus: A YC Company Powering Discussions on Any Page?
I thought you, as the inventor of the whole idea, deserved some real credit and thanks for getting the system started at Google in the first place. :)
They seem to be working on that problem too with Google Gears where you can work offline. Hopefully the gmail/calendar GG apps will be out soon to solve the problem.
Thanks Stephanie! :)
He's lucky no-one's invented a time machine and gone to kick his ass.
There's a party on my forum http://staunch.disqus.com/

Very impressive work they've done. I think this one is going to be a winner. Should solve a lot of problems that Joel Spolsky was just complaining about with typical blog comments. Reddit-style discussions for any page with full control for the owner.

http://disqus.com/about/team/
Loopt is on a pay service; they don't need money from ads because they're not a "free" service, but check out all the web-based ones: Zenter was bought by Google, so advertising applies, as mentioned. Xobni hasn't released anything yet, but once they have something, we'll see if there are ads, and if an ad-based company acquires them. Heysan will need to make money at some point -- obviously if you don't mind operating at a loss then you don't need income from ads, but deficit operations can't last. Going public is extremely unlikely so both Xobni's and Heysan's investors presumably invested based on an expectation of acquisition, probably by a large ad-based company. Justin.tv? "There are a number of ways to advertise on Justin.tv - both within the show itself and on our webpage" (from the FAQ). Even the site you're reading now is financed with money made from advertising dollars, since Viaweb was bought by Yahoo and that sale is what's paying the bills around here (and so by extension, all YC companies are initially financed by ads, too; and doubly so when Paul Buchheit of GMail and AdSense fame is one of the investors, as with Auctomatic).

The whole topic reminds me of Feynman's story about his father teaching him about how life on Earth moves because the Sun shines.

Advertising revenue is the solar energy incident on Earth of the web.
It's an interesting concept, but the setup takes away a lot of the incentives that drive people to not have a life for months on end so they can succeed. If a venture succeeds, the people who actually did it only get a fraction of the payoff. If they don't succeed, everything's still okay since they can wait for someone else to succeed and still see a payoff.

If everyone's waiting for another venture to succeed, they're not trying as hard to make theirs succeed.
rot13: cyrnfr qb abg srrq gur gebyyf
Amazon Prime makes this even worse -- especially easy to accumulate books that you'll only eventually skim through or half-read.

Moving out of a bigger apartment/house into a smaller one, especially under a tight deadline, can be a great way to shed some stuff as well. (inc. a 50lb FedEx package to the parents back home =))
lol but you have to admit GMail was pretty freakin incredible when it first came out. (still is, we just take it for granted now =))
hi, could you please elaborate on that throwaway line '..takes me a little longer...'.
i'm just a user so when i saw gmail and google aps, my first thought was woohoo, i don't need to know how to do the boring back end stuff for email/calendars etc if/when i need to set a system up for myself. it's not a new idea but would you say your experience in the back end stuff blinded you to newer ways of doing things? can't remember who said it, but once you have a solution to a problem, regardless of how tortuous it is, it's always going to win out over the hassle of researching and troubleshooting an alternative, just because you know it's going to take x hours and you can budget the time accurately - especially when you have 10 things to do at once that you aren't sure of the solution to.
(btw just to be clear, i'm not hassling you - i just think there's a general principle here that youth has a natural advantage purely through not lugging the baggage of experience along with them. same in the physical sciences where i hang out except we have to wait for generational retirement for the new cycle ;-)
Why do people copy other people's blog postings into their blogs?
Wow. This is kind of a Good Idea.

Good stuff Daniel.
This is kind of like a MyBlogLog but not crappy. Nice. Very nice.
seriously - ynews worthy?
Applying the Pareto Principle to the GTD
A methodology for taming huge GTD generated lists.
It doesn't make sense to go through all my comments ever made and down vote them. If you do so all that's gonna happen is some friends are gonna go and do the same to you and vote up my comments again. At the end no1 is going to benefit. Now please tell us your startup since you are so sincere about down voting me and I will tell mine. You are acting like a groupy
From the YC crowd, Reddit and most recently Adpinion seem to try exploiting recommendation systems. My experience with Reddit's "recommended" page tells me it is useless for now. I hope Adpinion doesn't rely solely on getting recommendation system right.
SQLite is a great piece of code, but it's intended for slightly different audience than MySQL and other client-server DBs. I'd use SQLite embedded in an application to store internal data, configuration, or as some domain specific file format. This way it is an alternative to xml or inventing your own file formats. (you get SQL queries for free). Where you expect concurrent access and high loads, a client-server still suits better. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
Detect and prevent someone from running through a user's threads down voting a lot of them in quick secession.
Ahh I see I was looking more into using SQlite for client-server purposes. I should have rephrased my question along those lines. But YC won't let me edit my message :-)
Marked up when I read that you threw out your bed. That gave me a good laugh, as I didn't realize at first that you literally meant that you're down to "one suitcase full of things".
I'm not so sure about the PhDs comment. Nearly every professor's office I've been to is filled with crap.
I used to put my hopes onto the computer, but by now I am worried that it will merely shift the problem. While space is not a problem on todays hard drive, too much "stuff" still makes navigating it strenuous...

Still, I can't wait for good ebook readers to appear, books are my single biggest "stuff problem".
Thanks for your advice, I'll keep that in my mind.
Unfortunately it's not only useless stuff we are buying. We are also buying lies in mass media. Basically, both are result of our inability to reason quickly and independently.
Thanks for your comments. I just have a concern that once a company holds a patent on something, they're closer than me in creating a similar product.

I agree with you on all points made.

I'll keep working on it.

Thanks
I appreciate your sarcastic humor.

Paul's essays on entrepeneurialism are incredible, but this one seemed really sophomoric to me. (e.g. about as intellectually complex as the other stoned conversations I could have had after watching Fight Club!)
Team Room in Flex2.0
As part of its ongoing commitment to provide human capital, GeniTeam (www.geniteam.com), today announced alpha release of "Team Room" to support their virtual team model. This product is designed to enhance collaboration between team members dispersed across different geographical locations. The business model coupled with the product, shall allow high tech startup to hire remote teams and save significantly on operating cost.
Beginning in January 2008, GeniTeam will also include video conferencing in application. Startups hosting their virtual teams with GeniTeam will be able to enhance management of their virtual teams through Team Room, after beta launch, expected in winter 2007. The application is developed using Flex 2.0, hibernate 3.0, spring and Java.
Cool: not concerned about geography - that would be ideal for me.

Dubious: I'd like to see a name or two associated with it, or a little bit more about them. I mean, anyone can put up a web page...
Socialistic (community) approach to become capitalists (rich) - seems like a problem here.
I am little suspicious about the website itself. It doesn't contain who's who (funny they're asking your resume without revealing their resumes). It doesn't contain contact details like phone number, postal address, etc. It's all up in the air.

Seems like good old Nigerian emails scandal written all over it.
Great article. The limit doesn't seem to be in the algorithm (as this article makes clear), it's the ability of a 1 through 5 star system to accurately reflect a person's feelings about a movie.

While algorithms for predicting your upcoming ratings based on your previous ratings may not be able to improve...surely there are some creative ways to re-think the entire system:

Two obvious approaches would be to rate on multiple scales (funniness, intellectual weight, 'light'-ness, etc.), and to include a comment-tracking system alongside the simple rating system to provide a better more complex picture of the film (as Reddit, and YCnews do).
it's done by the guy who sold epinions to eBay. and the guy who is helping out entrepreneurs with VentureHacks. and he just invested in twitter.
Well its good to know that it is a legitimate website. I would prefer who's who to be, contact details, links to their blogs, etc on the website.
Following up on comments about buying good things that get heavy use...

I'm typing this comment on a PowerBook G4 that has probably seen over 6 000 hours of use. At an initial purchase price of ~$1800, that's a bargain. I use this thing all the time and have realized so much value from it.[]

Compare this to my "good suit" which cost about $600, and has been worn a total of < 50 hours (job interviews, special occasions, etc).

Both are tools with a specific purpose but I get much more of a warm feeling using this computer, knowing that I bought a high quality tool and am using it to the fullest extent.

[] This isn't a Mac vs PC comment - if you got a top quality ThinkPad or Vaio notebook and are using it daily, then you know what I mean.
I like to buy vowels best of all.
reddit did, with good results.

I think if you don't have a good idea of what you're doing when you start, you might need to write a throwaway version first, see what works and what doesn't, then write the real app. I suspect in many cases, bottom-up design will reduce the need to rewrite by giving you more opportunities to refactor instead of throwing out the whole thing.
I admit I was joking a bit about the "getting older" and "taking longer" part. Had I played more extensively with gmail earlier, I would have switched right when it was possible to keep your domain, which I think has only been possible for a few months now. So I think a lack of knowledge about gmail played a bigger role than age. To the extent that adapting to new contexts is a reflection of "age", I am a very young person. (After using gmail for 1 day with my startup's streamfocus.com domain, I switched my whole architectural firm over)

As far as the age issue, in the sense that you're talking about, I've met many 20 somethings who acted "older" than me. I have always been a risk taker, an optimist, a person constantly learning to improve, and many people aren't. This is not an age issue, but an outlook on life issue.
oops, my footnote turned into markup... that was the point of the paired square brackets that italicized the middle of my comment above.
I don't understand how people, other than those with perfect memories, can be satisfied only reading a book one time. Any book that I thought worthwhile enough to finish the first time, is at least worth picking up again to see if I still think the same way. Even if I don't find it as useful the second time through, I recognize the perspective I've gained.
I think this approach is better than nothing, but wow, what a pain when you get new actions you need to add to manually numbered lists, especially if they're somewhere near the middle! Dynamic Prioitization is crying for automation :)
MSNBC.com Launches Vertical Ad Networks With Pulse 360 To Compete With Major Ad Networks