skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There will always be competition. There are probably half a dozen other companies doing similar things that you just don't know about yet. Most of the really successful companies that I can think of weren't the first ones on the market.

Like others have said, learn from them. Figure out some need that they're not addressing and sure up that niche and try to grow from there. That may actually lead you to a point where you're not going head-on against them, and even if it doesn't it'll give you some runway before you're really going one-on-one.
MentalFaces.com - my for-fun project
As a side project of my side project I've released http://mentalfaces.com. Not to offend DropBox and others BIG boys. I was just a bit tired with my main work and used this technique of relaxing by doing a completely different thing. Enjoy. Or reject.
I will definitely check out both. Thanks!
And rejected from YC the first time, if I remember correctly.
Design, user experience and development at Canonical
They seem to be referring to Linux :)
The actual title of the article is "Finding cracks in Facebook", not "Cracks in Facebook". Two totally different ideas, from a readers perspective.
Seriously? Yet another photo-sharing site?

Unless it's a game changer like fotonauts, you might want to change your game plan.
How the star wars lightsaber sound was made
Run Windows Apps 100% Seamlessly on Ubuntu
The all-american history of shopping carts
Online Storage With a Twist
Army still using physicians in interrogation, bioethicist says
Is JavaScript becoming a Ruby killer?
Now that's freshness!
I'm probably going to be the sole wet blanket here.

Ask yourself this question. Will your product be substantially different from this competitor's product?

If yes, you might want to do something else. Like what you said, this competitor has growing traction. It'll be difficult for you to break the momentum especially if you provide nothing different.

If you really want to fight with this competitor well, you must offer something different to the users. Eg. tumblr or posterous is like a super-easy lite version of wordpress. That's why they're gaining traction. There are probably XXX number of blogging systems out there that are similar to blogger/wordpress and they just can't break through. Those that broke through differentiate themselves well from these existing services.

dropbox is not like the hundred other online storage site. Their interface is brain-dead simple compared to the competition.

Will your product be so? That's the question you have to ask yourself.

I'm not saying this to be a spoilsport but to help you prevent wasting your precious development time.
Pretty amusing experiment. The site doesn't seem to like pg's informal writing style.

Very cool website though. I need to use this on my blog posts.
If you have same set of features, then beat them on the UI.
BlueScreen - a screen saver for Windows
No. I won't attempt to refute claims that Ruby is a temporary hype language (though I don't personally agree), but to suggest that Javascript will be the language to dethrone it is ludicrous. What he essentially suggests is that Javascript is becoming powerful enough to eliminate the current need for server side languages. This, simply, is not the case.
It's just a side project, but thanks for the words of encouragement.
Don’t Hammer Yammer. Think Bigger
I doubt it. At least in the press, a lot of Apple's growth is attributed to 'See how good ipod/itunes works? You'll like OS X.'

I think I recall Apple's own marketing materials leveraging the same 'If you get itunes, you'll get all apple stuff' line.

That all sits on top of the fact that Apple doesn't necessarily seem that excited over selling macs. They're happy selling iphones & ipods that need pc support. It may be a lead in to a mac, but's its a big business in itself. A single long term iphone user may even be worth more then a mac user (kickbacks, music/apps, more frequent upgrading).

So purposely being crap on windows is not smart.
I really doubt it. The whole point to encryption is that the storage area doesn't know anything about your files.
I don't really have sympathy for scam victims. a fool and his money...
What I find interesting is this: The music player has become a huge pivot point. Itunes is (theoretically) one of the reasons ipods have made it.

None of the pre-ipod desktop players really got much out of their previous positions.

Imagine if in the first few ipod years, scandisk, sony or some unknown had come to market with an ipod that uses winamp as its itunes. half the price & just use whatever software you were using before. That would have been a big gun in the arsenal. It was already popular with the right people to buy mp3 players (people who had mp3s), already proved to be nice to use (lots of people used it).

Instead, they used their own crappy software that no one in a million years would choose to use if it wasn't for the damn mp3 player they got when they where too cheap to go for an ipod.
I was on a plane going to San Jose, the flight attendant asked what I wanted and I said, 'pop' (being from the midwest) and the guy next to me, turn to me and said 'not from california?' I always thought is was funny.

btw coke is not pepsi, it's better accept no substitutes.
I didn't vote you down, I think your point is valid. Still, I think this is something that people like to see surfaced here. Who knows what ideas it peaks in the minds of readers? People could be getting ideas about anything from a GIS for human terrain . . . to a Pop vs. Soda civil war video game. You never know.
"Yammer was founded by former executives and early employees of PayPal, eGroups, eBay, and Tribe. It is backed by venture capital firms Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures."

Maybe it "won" because it has the PayPal mafia backing it...
I wouldn't recommend this in a corporate environment. I used to have this screensaver at work, until a helpful member of IT took it upon himself to replace my PC's hard disk while I was away from my desk as he thought my machine was repeatedly crashing.

I changed screensaver after that...
The New Samsung M310
Samsung M310 is an upcoming mobile handset of 87 g, which will released in a shining Black color in the third quarter of 2008. This slenderizing mobile.It is a compact set of wide range of features including Java MIDP 2.0, Built-in handsfree, calendar, calculator, Alarm, and T9 to bring convenience and simplicity in today’s hectic lifestyle.
Oh? That's just weird..

I haven't used iTunes myself, by the way - I buy CDs for the sound quality.

Sorry for the misinformed post.
Along these lines, I want to know what the catch is. Where/how are the files stored, how do they stop us from going past 2gb, is there anything in place for when the RIAA/MPAA come calling? More critical replies please, YC.
If you believe in your idea, keep going. While they may have hit first, you can adjust your strategy now that their hand has been played.

This sort of thing happens all the time; few ideas are truly original.
GUIMagnets - Prototyping made sticky
Profit, is the 100 pound gorilla. Can two company survive and make money both at the same time?
Hey man. I didn't mean to discourage you. I just don't want to see you wasting your precious development time. The most precious thing to a developer is his time. So I don't want to see another developer spending a lot of effort on his baby and yet it doesn't gain traction. I would rather the developer devote his time to some project that is different and have a better chance of succeeding.

if your photo app is going to bring something radically different to the table, then i say 'bring it on'
Gary Vaynerchuk has some serious character. A great guy.
Wow that looks ugly. Why did they go with the motocross style? They should have gone for the sport bike style or a touring style.

Motocross and electric just doesn't look right.
You had me worried there for a second but it turns out that you are allowed to display adsense in an iframe although google says -

'Our targeting technology is not optimized to serve ads within a separate IFRAME. If you placed the AdSense code in a separate IFRAME, your site may display less targeted ads or public service ads.'

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=...
Can you give some reasons you think Javascript isn't good enough for server side programming?

Certainly the language is pretty powerful, and with Rhino it's fairly easy to integrate with existing libraries.
This is an interesting site, and I think may benefit my startup users. My site slapastory.com is a social site focusing on writers, I would love to cross link with you?
Let me know.
Muhammad Yunus, Nikola Tesla, Akio Morita, Kiichiro Toyoda, Jeff Bezos.
there are millions of people in this country. Even now when I tell people about craigslist they ask what is that? There is always place to compete.

I mean look at eBay, they are in world known, but their user base is only 144 million people world wide. Sure it sounds huge, but in reality its just a tiny portion.

As long as there is no first comer advantage(i.e. how eBay pretty much has a monopoly on auctions), you can launch a decade later, and still manage to get up on top(i.e. Google)
My impression is that cperciva is after this problem, but the wait seems indefinite.
yeah the Ninja 250 is great..everyone loves them as starter bikes, since the things don't drop in value. You can buy a new one for $3,500 or a 8 year old model for $2,500.

And unlike all other 250cc bikes that tend to have the motocross style, the 250R actually looks like a sport bike. Sure its slow as hell, but it gets great mpg and has enough power for regular daily driving
uhhh, what? how does having faster, fatter client side effect the server side at all (in the m and the c.. the v may be data transforms from objects->html to objects->json.. meh)

he isnt even proposing JS on the server side.
Without a good platform there's not much to say about the validity of a programming language for a specific task other than it's Turing complete and it has features that might be nice someday if they could actually be used.

Until Rails ruby wasn't a particularly nice language for coding server-side web applications. In 2002-2003 I worked for a company developing one, and had it taken off we would have had to rework it in another language very quickly.
Call me cynical, but I bet even if the Ubuntu desktop becomes measurably more "usable" than OS X or Windows, people will still use OS X or Windows because they have already learned how to work around the unusability of those OSes. At some point, people don't know what's usable, they just know which buttons to press to get what they want.

However, if we make Ubuntu easy for new users to pick up, and we make sure new users (read: kids) have Ubuntu, then we'd be on to something.

(BTW, I call it "the Ubuntu desktop" instead of "the Linux desktop" because the latter term is meaningless. My definition of the Linux desktop is xmonad, emacs, urxvt, firefox, and amarok. I doubt many other people have the same taste, although I advocate it to anyone that will listen.)
Neat. Why would this offend DropBox?
I actually buy CDs, and I discover lots of new music through Pandora and Last.fm. The music industry is trying to promote album sales by killing internet streaming?
Weight?
I think they were sued over iexplore.exe, not mshtml.dll.
Silly cloud computing commercial with *automatic weapons* destroying servers
Your comment really reminds me of this:

"...What you want to be able to say about technology is: it just works. How often do you say that now?" -- http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

A damn good sign for Dropbox methinks.
I didn't realize how little Google does to anonymity the data. What is the point of dropping 1/4 of the IP address if you are tracking my identity permanently across all IP addresses via cookies? I really feel like they've been misleading me this whole time about what they are doing. Not cool.
So buggy software is now 'malware'? That seems slightly harsh.
Client != Server.
Nurturing Your Network
Slightly worse than the Firerift commercial.
my gosh... that's where my best project is...

a total skunkworks that achieved viral adoption in my side of the company...
Upmod for informing me about SeamlessRDP (although I'm not sure I understand exactly what I'm seeing technically, the result is pretty handy)

This article seems to imply that the problem with Windows is the shell (explorer.exe) and the taskbar. While I have no desire to start a lame Windows bashathon, I'd say that's probably the most superficial interpretation of the situation I've heard in a long time.
I haven't looked at Yammer, but Twitter seems like it's a bit 'free form' for business. What kinds of controls over inappropriate content, frequency of use, departmental scoping etc., is Yammer coming to the table with?

Small enterprises like software companies will probably be just fine with Twitter, but the real money is most likely in large enterprises with maybe 5000+ users, and real needs to control the uses that the system is put too, control abuse and so on. For example, the abuses possible with email and the web is a nightmare for these companies.
One of YCombinator's "Startup ideas we'd like to fund" was "9. Photo/video sharing services." So there's somebody else out there that doesn't think Flickr/Photobucket/FaceBook is the last word in photo-sharing.

"...but how I want it" are powerful words. If existing products don't do what you want, and you can find a way to make them do what you want without a huge team and lots of $$, why not?
I don't understand. I was actually writing server-side javascript before taking a break to read this site
...and then execute with the speed of a-thousand-startled-gazelles. Some wise lisp programmer once said - I'm paraphrasing - that one of the reasons his company was able to compete in a market of 30 odd players was that they could often duplicate a new feature within a day or two of a competitor announcing it in a press release.

You're small and unencumbered, and if your heart is really, truly in it, bloody dangerous. Good luck.
this seems like an easy backup solution for a small business.
I was specifically referring to the book by that title, which you should at least glance at if you are doing a startup. http://www.gobignetwork.com/products/GoBigBook.aspx

Basically, if you are going that route, you want to be the 80-ton gorilla in your market, you want to be first, biggest and most; you want to be Amazon, or eBay, or Google; not booksamillion, or ask.com.

From a distant perspective, it doesn't really matter if you build a world-changing, industry-creating, market-dominating company or a niche lifestyle company.

But if you aim low, you'll hit low.
I think as time goes on computer manufacturers will make slow movements towards it to avoid paying the 'Microsoft tax' particularly on low-end computers where Linux thrives. If computer manufacturers want to use it hardware vendors will be forced to support it. Once there's a sufficient market-share and the environment is better set-up to support it commercial software development will start inching towards it.

This has been a big struggle so far as there's long been a catch-22 that not many people use Linux and it's difficult to use Linux because no-one supports it as not many people use it. The cycle is slowly but surely changing - and already has happened to a degree with ultraportables - but expect it to take 5 to 10 years for it to get a decent amount of market-share as it continues to improve. I'm not saying it will ever 'take over' Windows, but it only needs 5-10% market share to be taken seriously - much like Mac OS X - and it's already got a highly dedicated user-base that's more likely to grow over time especially as there's as thanks to ultraportables there is now product that can be used to expose people to it.

What didn't help was the highly fractured community, something which has significantly improved as of late largely thanks to Ubuntu; over-idealistic "free software" evangelists who didn't like seeing the bigger picture; poor user experience, something which has changed significantly with text files being the exception rather than the rule; traditionally poor software support that's slowly but surely changing thanks to web-based apps, a wider selection of native applications, improvements to Wine and Microsoft's move towards .NET, and hopefully in the long-run greater, better and easier commercial applications; the lack of support by OEMs but this has largely changed with Dell, the biggest computer manufacturer in the world, slowly but surely moving towards Ubuntu; and the "Linux is hard" meme that perpetuated thanks to overenthusiastic highly technical users a decade ago which made Linux a dirty word.

It's very easy to forget that many of the variables that made alternative OSes getting a reasonable market-share impossible even 10 years ago have changed beyond recognition.
The Omnivore's Dilemma is a must read. http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meal...
You're assuming they did it on purpose. Why assume that?

Ever heard the saying about not attributing to malice something that can be explained by incompetence.
There's a limit as to how much users can buy/watch/listen to/afford though. That's the reason the whole long tail theory has been mostly evaporating anyway.
Pfft. It's called "coke," regardless of what it tastes like.
I would definitely suggest that you not give up development of your idea.

As someone else has already said, learn from your competition and make your product better as a result.

If the idea you're working on is a good one, then you're almost bound to have competition. So I see competition as a sign that I'm on the right track.

Keep at it! You just have to make your implementation a little bit better than the other guy.
There's two possiblities here:

- Will JavaScript displace Ruby as a server-side language?

- Will developers push more and more of their application logic to the client, relegating the server to be a simple storage layer (with authentication, etc, thereby reducing the usefulness of server side frameworks like Rails.

I could see both happening. JavaScript is the most widely deployed language to clients, and you can control what you deploy on servers, so it seems like the ideal language if you want the same across both clients and servers.
Does this imply that I should short music company stocks?
12seconds.tv Adds Video Replies,Seesmic Flinches...
You sir, are awesome, I would give you triple karma if I could.

For those who don't "get" the quote, it's the infamous 1984 Apple ad, directed by Ridley Scott.

Links below for reference

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(television_commercial)
This is more to scratch my own itch. The online photo situation is so huge that there might even be a few, or many other people who like what I've built. If so, great. If not - I don't care, I built something I wanted to build. It isn't going to be radically different, just "sort of" different. Hopefully fun, too.

Sometimes I think hacker attitudes are way too dramatic. "Precious development time", "... my baby." Discouraging projects unless they are "radically different." Commit 100% or don't bother! Utmost passion and dedication to your online power saving widget! GO BIG OR GO HOME!

A lot of really good software was created on a lark. Some of it even became financially successful. It doesn't need to be quit your job and drop out of school to make the next Google (using Haskell, this time) or else you're wasting your time.

That said, at my day job I have genetically engineered biomolecules to act as a massively parallel neural network which can design new derivative investment instruments on the fly and corner the market on them before other hedge funds even know they exist. As a clever side-effect, this process unearths retrotransposon based cures for AIDS hidden in "junk DNA". My work has been "certified green" because the biological residue from the computations can be dumped onto ocean oil spills and automatically transform the petroleum into vegan friendly biodiesel which swims to shore on its own. I have also hacked my roomba to perform an advanced form of lasik surgery which restores sight and plan on sending it on a world tour to communities in the rain forest afflicted with "river blindness." Hopefully these advances in the state of the art more than make up for the time I'm wasting on my boring photo site.

EDIT: gotta give a shout out to my homies at CERN for hooking one of my molecules up with a free trip to the 11th dimension after they find the higgs. thanks, guys!
Voted up to equal your voting down. (I'm indifferent about the comment..)

And while the Coke vs Pop map is a but old / not really news, there were some other interesting visualizations on the blog a bit further down.

So even if a particular story isn't "hacker news," the site has some visualizations that might be of interest still. Which, imo, makes it ok to post here, even if the title could have been better. But thats just my opinion and I'd hate to force it on someone.
Like i said, if his app brings something different to the table like Fotonauts, bring it on (read my first post: I said change the game plan only if it offers nothing different over the existing services. I didn't say forget about the idea).

It's just that I've seen too many startups doing photo-sharing sites (admit it. You've seen your fair share of them) promising something different but in the end, they offer nothing compelling over the current services.

It's like someone saying they want to build a craigslist killer because of all sort of cool features that they can't do with craigslist. And when they launch it, yeah they're right. There are some cool features that they can't do with craigslist like advanced filtering but these are not compelling enough to differentiate themselves.
Yahoo Details Plans To Open Up Web Sites
Learning the vi and Vim Editors Book Review
I will use it only if it has a command that will mount the dropbox somewhere in my filesystem, no nautilus.
Server side javascript runs ycfeeds.com
Load OSX 10.5 Leopard on the eeePC
That furiouslol guy just wants to scare you off so you won't be raining on his parade when he launches his photo sharing site next week.
Having tested both, right now the ease of use goes to VMware.

VirtualBox, once they fix a few bugs, will win on wider platforms (OSX, Solaris, Linux, Windows) availability and price (essentially free).
"Until Rails ruby wasn't a particularly nice language for coding server-side web applications. "

Sure it was. You just had to know where to look for frameworks and libs and how to code in Ruby.
Yammer is Twitter for corporates done right.

Funny seeing how the blogosphere slams them for being a ripoff of twitter.

Hello! Facebook is a ripoff of Friendster. But Facebook is Friendster done right.

Yammer totally deserve the award. Everyone I ask (who's not a blogomaniac) thought Yammer was a great product in broadcasting news to a large group (beats mass-emailing)
No. Lots of people don't actually like JavaScript much, especially its inheritance model, which is why you get obscene over-the-top technical solutions to stop people from writing it. The language has also been slow to evolve to fix core problems with it due to the fact that any changes need to be agreed with by the major browser vendors. It's likely the language wouldn't be popular if it wasn't for the fact it is the de facto in-browser programming language.

FWIW, I actually /do/ like JavaScript.
It doesn't. It just syncs the byte changes.
Bill Gates Does The Robot,At the End Of the Commercial
The big question: which big player has the right mobile web development strategy?
You can't argue that they aren't doing good for the environment. At least they're making a small impact, even if it's not a total "offset" of the internet experience. In fact, they don't even claim to offset it; they claim to "neutralize" it with clean energy in proportionate amounts.
(oops. lost the sprintfs...)
http://presentlyapp.com/

Another twitter for the enterprise. Looks good.