skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Friendster lands a third patent
Where to get business advice - free
Jason Fried - web apps, cash flow and pricing
According to Mizuko Ito and Howard Rheingold's research, we typically don't telecocoon with more than four or five people. Why would you want to telecocoon with strangers? It makes no sense to me.

Maybe I'm just getting old.
Oh wow, I just made an account to check it out. This thing looks evil. I'm staying as far away as possible.
How Will StumbleUpon Hit the Advertising Market?
Which startup is most worthy of in-depth study for a budding web 2.0 entrepreneur?
The Perfect VoIP softphone and IM client
Iain Lamb: "The New Hacker's Toolkit" [video]
Tell me about it....being a technical guy myself it's quite fun and interesting to get into projects that really catch your interest. The hard part is to translate those projects into something that users want. Cuz really do users give a crap about how cool SIP(Session Initialization Protocol) is? and what are it's implications for the mobile telecommunications industry. haha
A new business model emerges that could save google video from some further legal threats
It doesn't seem like so bad of an idea. A tad bit idealistic, and ignores the fact that we divide up and layer our society on purpose. We shell ourselves up with people who we see as similar to ourselves, and shut out the rest. Perhaps if there is a way they could apply some method of connecting "random" people based on a whole series of information such as interests/personality.
Save and organize videos, clips and links from anywhere all in one place
Mobile is a dud?
Maybe what he does has a side effect on usability. Looking closely at individual users (vs. looking at aggregated statistics) may help really understand what the customers are doing.
Market Share vs. Installed Base
It's not wider. Perhaps it seems wider because the top bar is narrower.
Supoenas and Gootube
"Should Google and Youtube be forced instead to add a link to the contents official home (where legal copies can be purchased) and thereby referring potential customers back to the aggrieved party?"

Would this mean that the aggrieved party would then share some revenue for sales generated by YouTube? I think this is only fair. Mark Cuban talks about this a little in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4859
Who wants to discuss about MySQL vs PostgreSQL?
I am wondering which choice is popular among this startup community? Tests showcase PostgreSQL perfomance and scalability on a multicore to be better than MySQL.

What are your thoughts and the database of your choice?

http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/5
http://tweakers.net/reviews/657/6
Tello, John Sculley's new startup, dies
Secret of Google's simple design: founders didn't know HTML
University lecture notes in math, computer science and physics
Scoble: "Microsoft's Internet execution sucks."
Depend what your goals are.

Are you looking to turn a hobby into a business and grow it with minimal cost? LiveJournal.

Do you want to start small and opportunistically grow the business over a long period of time? Microsoft.

Do you want to change the world and change it now? Google.

Are you looking for examples of what not to do? Value America, or just go work for some startup off the street.

Are you looking to bootstrap a company for very little money and the flip it to an acquirer? Reddit, ViaWeb (Yahoo Store), or Vermeer (Microsoft FrontPage). The latter took VC investment, so I wouldn't really call it "very little money".

Are you looking to succeed in some business, any business, and do it on a dime? Flickr.
X/HTML 5 Versus XHTML 2
"We manage to get back around 1AM and Im stunned to see that kids are sitting and talking and playing ping-pong. Whats wrong with them?, I wonder. I just came back from an arduous journey and theyre playing like its nothing! I head up to my room, but nobody seems to notice a thing. My roommates are also just sitting at their computers, as if everything is normal"

I know the feeling. My friends and family do not understand my desire to start a company. The rush of creation that one expereiences when they are working for themselves makes all else seem insignificant and minor. Well put.
I'm not sure. I think scoping would screw you up. First off, there's a small reason right away why it wouldn't work. You'd have to quote your argument to debugExpr, as in, say, debugExpr('2 times 3'). I did a little test at the Python prompt and the results didn't look good for faking this macro with eval:

def foo(x):
return 2 times (x + 3)

> foo(1)

8

(not a full version of debugExpr, but enough to test:)

def debugExpr(expr):
print "Expr is " + expr
return eval(expr)

def bar(x):
return 2 times debugExpr('x + 3')

> bar(1)

Expr is x + 3

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "", line 1, in ?

File "", line 2, in bar

File "", line 3, in debugExpr

File "", line 0, in ?

NameError: name 'x' is not defined

PS: I couldn't use the asterisk symbol in the post, so I used 'times' instead.
We're building on PostgreSQL now. I'm not an expert on either platform but the research I did led me to PostgreSQL due to its better performance on larger systems and in more traditional enterprise software categories. Our software will operate with Oracle sometimes and having a similar database will make a few things easier.
Reminds me of a quote: "The nice thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."

There _are_ cool additions to both, and that's the problem. Two sets of standards that set out to accomplish the same goal. Anyhow, there will be some time to kill before browsers (read: IE) start incorporating the best stuff.
The Geek's Guide to Good and Evil
O'Reilly Radar  The Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived
heh, i remember seeing those business card cartoons on the internet like a LONG time ago, maybe 4-5 years at least.
Yeah, in an article, I mentioned this as one of the coincidences that made Google fabulously successful. Have a look,

http://shuzak.com/Personal/Article.php?Article-Title=Coincidences-that-made-Google-successful
All of them. No one success story will be an instruction manual for yours.
I signed up for GrandCentral some time ago, got a nice 408 number, but I never got around to using it. It's one of the coolest services I've seen offered recently and that's because it passed my litmus test for quality: I see myself using it. That said, I haven't used it _yet_, but I can see it coming in handy very soon.
According to the article's chart, it seems Good / Evil is also 'Young and edgy' / 'Old and stuffy'
Want Your own Web Portal?
This reminds me of a similar situation mentioned in "Founders at Work" about PayPal's original plan to develop applications on the Palm Pilot.

In their own words, "..the move of the enterprise to handheld devices was actually not forthcoming...Any minute now (we thought), there'll be millions of people begging for security on their handheld devices. It just wasn't happening. We were correct to change our strategy, since it still hasn't happened."

Has anyone considered the possibility that the cellphone might not be the glorious next step forward? Most tech evangelists, including myself, expect mobile devices to eventually diminish our reliance on the desktop. What if that actually never happens at the expected grandeur scale?

A friend of mine recently bought a Nokia 8800. It's an expensive phone, so I asked him what he used it for. His answer, "for phone calls and sms". It seems to me that mobile startups are pushing supply ahead of demand.
Hackers promise to begin disclosing security bugs in MySpace every day next month
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129933-pg,1/article.html
"It was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life."

I was skeptical when I read this, but I tried it and sure enough, if you make a form without a submit button, hitting return submits the form. I didn't know this. Neat! or, something.
Anecdotally:

I used to work for "Grand Central Communications". It was really a vision of what not to do with a startup: Enormous development cycle, bleeding money (Hasley Minor, the principle investor and CEO, used to compare it do driving an Audi off the roof of the building every day), way too many people, sales team constantly selling functionality we did not support.

In late 2005 after multiple rounds of layoffs they cut their losses and folded. Existing team members willing to stick around formed Swivel (http://swivel.com) based on what we were working on at the time (which had nothing to do with what Grand Central was doing a year earlier). The name (and I guess trademark) "Grand Central Communications" got inherited by a VOIP company that was also funded by Minor Ventures (http://minorventures.com/) and that's the company O'Reilly is talking about. Good to hear they're turning the name around.
I had been reading numerous articles comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL and ran across this one. I wish they had mentioned some information about the configuration of the DBMS itself, such as the size of database buffers and query optimization settings.

Also, for their MySQL test procedures, I could not find any information regarding which storage engine they were using. InnoDB is fully ACID-compliant, whereas MyISAM has reduced overhead since it does support transactions and foreign key constraints, for example. I found a good article, http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/01/08/innodb-vs-myisam-vs-falcon-benchmarks-part-1/ , comparing the two storage engines, and the results were pretty surprising to me.

It ultimately comes down to your individual usage patterns. Using a database abstraction layer will allow you to test your application against different databases so you can see how your application performs first hand.
That's strange, I was just revising a few of those points myself. I'm a huge fan of that post or whatever you want to call it.

"The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will. How your own sovereignty inspires other people to find their own sovereignty, their own sense of freedom and possibility, will change the world far more than the the workÂs objective merits ever will."

Priceless.
Sure, that's why it's proceeds point #1:)
CSS sumerize feature. (report back if you get good results)
New ted talks are up. tech/entertain/design
I've used both and prefer Postgresql. Mysql with MyISAM is "faster" in the same way that bicycling down a hill with no brakes is faster. Mysql 5 with InnoDB is a little bit more serious and is worth considering.
Our Ruby on Rails app uses PostgreSQL (for now but that will change). We started off with MySQL but after growing quickly, we were forced to look into partitioning of the data. PostgreSQL was made to be easy for advanced stuff like that. We tried to do it with MySQL and failed because we're not MySQL experts and we managed to get it working with Postgres. Postgres has better documentation than MySQL so that might be the factor if you don't have a DBA you can readily ask for help. Here's a write-up by someone who went through similar process:

http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/archive/2006/11/04/166

Also, if you use Postgres on multi-CPU machines, it's faster than MySQL. But, make sure you read this:

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/oracle/115560
(comparison of Oracle/MySQL/PostgreSQL)

One last word of advice if you end up using PostgreSQL, learn and use this:

http://pgreplicator.sourceforge.net/

Finally, we are moving back to MySQL because we found a really fast replacement for the MyISAM storage engine (a lot faster than Postgres) and our part-time DBA knows MySQL and this new storage engine a lot better than Postgres. We are also moving to VPS architecture and Postgres' performance advantage over MySQL on a VPS doesn't really exist.

In the end, go with what your staff/friends know and what your hosting place recommends. If they have an optimized DB stack and provide some kind of a support for it, stick with that DB because you can always go to them for help!
Besides web 2.0, we can see some creativity in the games industry as well. For a more recent example of creativity in games, see:

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1299927595688205543

Maybe one might even find ideas from computer games that can be adapted to a web 2.0 context.
I remember when GrandCentral had some kind of an enterprise web service stack! I still have their CD somewhere from 2001 conference I attended. No wonder that idea went nowhere... you couldn't even describe it in 2 sentences. From what I remember, they went through a mountain of cash.

http://searchwebservices.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid26_gci844506,00.html

I'll probably never use their new service.. I've got enough bills relating to phones/internet/cell-data services.
This article is spot-on! As an angel investor, I routinely hear pitches about different mobile apps. My answer is always a big NO and I try everything to persuade small startups that have not spent any money yet on the idea, not to pursue it. If you have an idea for mobile handset market, read about "walled gardens" (google for more links): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walled_garden_(media)

Unless you have some extremely strong connections (i.e. you have an ex telco exec on the board or as a CEO), stay clear of ALL closed platforms. (Incidentally, and that also includes Windows/MSOffice/Exchange etc).Startups need to be agile and startups have a higher chance of becoming successful if there are less barriers that you need to jump over, not more. This is why Internet is a perfect platform for startups... there are virtually no barriers (unless net-neutrality is defeated)!
Web 2.0 Games Blog
High school student builds fusion reactor
Facebook - the complete biography
The essence of Ajax is getting Javascript to communicate with the server without reloading the page. Although XmlHttpRequest is most convenient, there were other methods of doing this before XmlHttpRequest such as

- loading a 1 pixel image and sending data in the image's cookie

- loading server data through a tiny frame which contained XML or javascipt data

- Using a java applet to fetch the data on behalf of javascript
Exactly. If you can't afford office space why not do your programming in a university library? Lot's of good reference materials at hand and places to hang out too.
Pyweek 4 - Registration Open.  Great coding challenge.
I highly recommend pyweek to anybody interested in coding. It's a one week long competition where you and a team of unlimited size build a game from scratch(mostly) in Python. To prevent cheating, or at least make it harder, a theme is voted on and announced at the beginning.

I'm posting this here because I competitions like this fit well with the ycombinator theme of getting something working out the door quickly. If you've never actually tried to produce something complex quickly by burning hard give this a shot. It is very inspirational to be able to look back at the end and see what you've done. If you're planning on doing a web startup I'd also recommend it as a team building activity. The stress is high, the time limiting, and the competition hectic. You'll find out quickly how well you can work with people in a crunch. And you will learn a lot both about coding and the people you work with.

This is the third one that Erik and I will be entering into. It's a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing some skilled competition coming from here.
gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": the sex & cash theory
24/7 eBusiness News Site - Finally!
Yeah, it's a different company with the same name (and same main investor).
Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are thriving as stock market is rocky
I could imagine why many startups have chosen to focus on mobile, especially when it's a space that's attracted significant investment from carriers and media conglomerates alike.

However, many startups underestimate the true intentions for these investments. For carriers, mobile media is an opportunity to get their foot in the door of content distribution. For media firms, it's a chance to amortize IP development costs and maximize returns by putting their franchise content on as many screens as possible.

For users, it generally means taking it up the backside.
Absolutely Parents: A new digg-type Parenting site
I'm very interested in this. A portion of my background is in game design at Atari and marketing at EA.

How does team selection work?
Goplan launches project management and collaboration app
Once you sign up you can create an entry which sets up your team. You just enter any team member names that happen to sign up there as well. Your entire team doesn't have to sign up officially.
How to host a product/feature design party
Is Refactoring Worth It for Startups?
They missed the brilliant viral marketing that gave thefacebook it's start at Harvard.

Harvard had an intranet facebook like system, where you could browse pictures of freshmen living in your dorm. Zuckerberg went around plugging into each dorm downloading all the pictures.

He put the pictures up on facemash.com in a Hot-or-Not style competition. Harvard shut him down and the rest is history.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=350143
Mark E. Zuckerberg '06 was not kicked out of Harvard for creating facemash.com and the rest is history
Reminds me of PG writing about how much persistence it took and pain it was for Loopt to make any headway with the carriers.

Steve Jobs has battled both the recording industry and the phone carriers and in both cases even _he_ has had to compromise a lot. Those massive entities seem about as geared towards innovation as banks.
How many users does a web 2.0 site need to take off?
I think it helps to note that Reddit didn't launch a few weeks ago.
Zero, as long as it is profitable.
Popularity Might Not Be Enough -- estimates on number of users required for ad-generated revenue
STIRR 2.3 founders mixer on this week in Palo Alto
Don't believe everything you read.

http://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.stanford.edu/
I wasn't implying anything about Scribd's growth. Just commenting on the obvious, continued growth of Reddit.
Tutorlinker has a new design
ha, nice!
I think the common antecedent is 'winning' / 'desperate'. See if Google continues to uphold their motto once some new up-and-comer starts beating them.
A definate read for all startups is Jeremy Liew's blog: http://lsvp.wordpress.com/. This lastest article is pretty sobering stats for anyone considering an eyeballs based business.
yeah, the nytimes article is pretty much a summary of his blog post:

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/three-ways-to-build-an-online-media-business-to-50m-in-revenue

and YCN discussion here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=4767
Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog
Concrete Startup Tips from Del.icio.us Founder
Supposedly a website targeted to a certain demographic needs 800 million page views a MONTH to generate 50 million dollars a YEAR. That means if you can get a million active users you are making maybe 6 million a year. I wonder if digg is anywhere near that?
he covers a bunch of this in his startup school speech:
http://wiki.ycombinator.com/presentations/apr06/Joshua_Schacter.mp3

worth a listen.
I was there :)
Would this work for a company designing a car? So why should we expect it to work for software?
I wonder where one can find some good data as to how well traffic actually converts, instead of just going by CPM. I know its better to worry about monetizing a site later, and getting users by giving them something that they want first, but not all startups can use this model.

Also, many sites, especially ones that spread virally (social networking, some dating, and basically anything that revolves around interaction with others instead of just "tools") there is an uphill battle to get the first decent size batch of users. I think linkedin is a good example of this. It took a while for them to get enough users to make it worthwhile for most professionals (those outside the valley) to want to join it.
Apollo Lands
Once you upload a photo, you can never take it down.
Heheh, reminds me of "The Homer."
I'm guessing you have a team set up? Working remotely?

Thanks for the info, btw -- all of this sounds exciting.
I have learned to embrace myspace just as I have learned to embrace Walmart. It might be cesspool to some, but it is what it is, which is mainstream. It is just a relection of our society, not something to be hated at all.

As far as the cracks go, they'll have little to no impact on their operaitons at all.
prior to multicore cpus asuming the scaling was achieved horizontally, MySQL has been a good choice. But today, if your systems comprising the clusters are at least dual core x2 cpu, I am lead to the conclusion, as nickb points out, that is better to use PostgreSQL.
adobe's site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/
And yet, ycombinator is funding a mobile-platform company, Tsumobi...
Hrm... Yet Another Project Management thing...

I think this is part of the reason I smell 'bubble' (although not as big as the last one). Like Paul has written elsewhere, there is tons of space left for startups, but what is happening is that lots of them are piling into the same spaces - depth instead of width. And that virtually guarantees some kind of shake out, especially if the economy in general turns south.
Thanks, bluishgreen. I look forward to hearing more.
PG writes in the Viaweb FAQ that they (and Yahoo) did not use any database, just files. It makes sense... Is there something fundamentally different about your app, so that a DB is obviously a better choice?
Care to explain why this was voted this down? It's true, as far as I can tell from this article:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/09/demo-day-y-combinators-spring-chicks/

So I'm a bit curious that Paul posted something about mobile being a dud. Perhaps he thinks Tsumobi has a good answer to part of the problems with mobile?

I'm curious because I'm pretty interested in the mobile space, and, indeed, wrote something very similar to Tsumobi (Hecl), and was thrilled to see that ycombinator thought enough of the idea to fund it. (Ok, yeah, would be nice if someone funded me, but I never really pursued Hecl as a startup idea, but more as an open source platform).
Kiko guys back as reality tv stars
Elusive Consumer: Music gets an 'F' Clue Score
It sounds like they're going to shotgun together some EVDO cards so they have enough bandwidth for a high quality stream? I wonder if they've created some kind of proxy to split up the stream and reassemble it with some hacked up cam-driver or something. Hopefully it's not too complicated a system.

Very interesting if it works out. Latency with EVDO isn't great, but mostly good enough. WiFi is pretty useless for mobile broadcasting because it's not very mobile.
Fun idea. I like it.
Yeah. Surprisingly compelling. Especially in the context of YC News given that right now it's a bunch of guys monitoring a recently released site that's getting a bunch of traffic.
Coincidentally, justin.tv succeeded in creating the only Web 2.0 chat room on the internet.
Justin.tv is live
RIP Twitter (2007-2007)
A thorough set of free videos by the product manager which introduce the platform, how to install and get started:

http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?id=378
One of the important points which they emphasize, which I've also heard from Guy, Seth Godin, and nearly everyone else-

The focus of a meeting with a VC isn't to get them to fund you. It's to get them to invite you back to a second meeting.

Keep it simple, focus on the hooks, and try to drive the key points home.

I imagine that the YC application is a similar process- They're going to read thousands of applications. I expect that the best strategy is to explain what's going on in broad strokes, so that you get the interview. Don't try to sell the entire project in one go. Focus on getting to the interview.
What's it like to make yourself rich on technology? No one seems to talk about it, why?