skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So far Amsterdam seems the most hacker-compatible city I've visited in continental Europe.
Is there a blog about startups and new technology from Asia?
i am especially curious on what is done in Japan, China, South korea or Taiwan. is there an equivalent to techcrunch or RW/W [...put your favorite tech blog here], or is innovation all in the US?
I think that FB is more than ConnectU could or would ever have been. If you read the article, it is lauding recent decisions which are outside of what ANY other social networking applications have attempted: to wit, disclosing news on others and opening up the platform.

Do you really think that ConnectU would have done any of that? Or would it be what it is today: a pale Friendster clone?
Don't forget the numerous articles that indicate that nearly 100% of YC startups have found success. Quite a heady business this entrepreneurism is ... 0.1% chance, 50% chance, 99% chance ... it's all so ... "dynamic".
What is a 'Successful' Start-Up?
Excluding the financial incentives and rewards associated with a successful start-up (i.e. acquisition price, IPO value, etc.), what other events or factors would allow you to feel that your start-up is a 'success'?

In other words, what is 'success' within the realm of a start-up (excluding $$$)?

I personally feel that a start-up's success is measured on its number of active users and its impact on other businesses and/or the world/society.

What is 'success' for you? I'm curious to see how other entrepreneurs view 'success'.
Hoping with you, man. Tell ingenium to keep at it.
Ask News.YC:  Where are good books/sites for semantic analysis, economics, and genetics?
When corrupt old men in Europe who all know each other from P2 meetings agree that you have to be assassinated, then you know you've succeeded. That or if you can make 10,000 people in Silicon Valley slam their heads into a wall and shout, "F^#% ME!!! WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?!?!?!?"
My question for you... do you post here sober or high? And if the answer is high, maybe you should buy some kratom from me. It's much better than what you're smoking, I promise.
This article is well-written, and the particular issue of status updates is especially pertinent considering the growth of related sites, such as Twitter.

However, the larger issue of Facebook changing the rules on people is a reality that any developer using Platform has been living with daily for months. Facebook is still searching for the balance between keeping a lock on its users' data and behavior, and opening up.
http://www.biologynews.net/ is good for biology news, surprisingly enough, but there's not a whole lot there about genetics
Working Hard. The biggest bullshit.
Sorry to interrupt, but I have a question. Do you really feel as if YOU working hard is ultimately going to make you successful. What I am saying is that would it not be smarter< even if you are building a startup, to find individuals who just are crazy about working and pay them the buck to do it. I also see lots of people who work hard, but their financial situation just cannot get better, although they do not spend lots of money. I am seriously re-thinking this working hard thing.
When you start hearing "How did you do it?"
If you gotta ask, then you are clearly not.
Can anyone explain this comment to me? What are the "bad vibes"?
STFU you crypto-narc!
IMHO your application would look much better with a prototype than a market survey attached.
crypto-narc?

edit: google just impressed me... it indexed this page for the word crypto-narc six minutes after the post!
Working hard is for suckers. Look at cats and hot chicks - they don't work at all and yet they find people to bust their rear ends to provide food and housing for them. Hard work is for amateurs and suckers. Pros are in it for the money. The best thing to do is to find some suckers and convince them you have a secret magical system that helps their hard work translate into success. But first they have to subscribe for $199/month. And you'll automatically rebill their cards unless they send you a letter written backwards in mandarin chinese which replaces every 7th word with every fourth. Then just sit back and do nothing and you'll get rich. Either that or convince them of some impending doom that only you know how to escape ... provided of course that they will demonstrate their worthiness by parting with their material goods - which of course you'll safekeep for them.
You've succeeded once people start asking you how you succeeded.
I'm not submitting an application, but my partner and I have copied it to Google Docs and filled it out for our own use. It turns out all our discussion meant when we wrote it down we were already 95% on the same page. It's still very useful as a way to refresh my memory, like pitching the idea to myself.
You're averaging 11 posts a day, so I doubt you are working very hard.
I'm using web.py. Email me your tips :-)
What's the difference between a startup and a magic spell? 
You assemble symbols in a specific manner. If done correctly, they will have an alchemical effect on the chemical reactions within the mind of the intended target. This will alter his perception of the world, which in turn will alter his actions, which in turn will further alter the world according to your will ... to a reasonable degree. Quick - what am I talking about - a spell or a business plan/website/demo?
Everything can be reduced to determinism. It's still easier to pretend we have free will.
Or if you can make 10,000 people in Silicon Valley call their lawyers and say "BUT I DID THINK OF THAT..."
wowow.

I just finished googling "kratom."

Now I'll wait six minutes and try googling "wowow."
That may be one of the indicators (and a shallow indicator at that) of success, but I'd be hard-pressed to use it as a threshold or a point of satisfaction in terms of success.
Wouldn't a start-up have much more meaning to a founder? Normally, when one comes up with an idea, it addresses a need in the world or a better way to do things.

Others have asked me for advice, but in no way do I feel that I have accomplished my mission. There are greater and more substantial objectives other than being asked advices or receiving praise.

My question was, what is 'success'?
too many results for wowow already. let's try:

wowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowoowow
CEO's should start firing people who buy IBMs.
3 Lessons in Clearing Hurdles & Lowering (some) Expectations - Found+READ
"I actually think C++ is ideal only for programmers without any ethics."

This guy is a little bit extreme.
A lot of people do the mental equivalent of moving a pile of bricks 20 feet to a new pile one by one. It may be hard, but it's also ineffective.

When I think of working hard in an entrepreneurial context I'm thinking of someone who's breaking down barriers, being relentless, striving for greatness (not just "good enough"), taking on tasks others would be afraid to, etc. Generally just pushing beyond the boundaries of what most people are willing to do.

I know a few people who are ridiculously successful and they all work (or worked) so hard that your average person couldn't handle their workload for even one week.
STFU you crypto-google employee!
OK, then success is something that is very personal. You've gotta define it for yourself. I wonder if you're undergoing an existential crisis, having succeeded at some superficial or not so superficial level but feeling there has to be something more out there that you're missing. There's nothing more out there. Life is only what you make it, just like success.

To some people, success is raising a happy family. To others, it is making manager or director or executive as a cog in a Fortune 500 machine. Most of us here want to start a successful company and make a nice profit or reach a liquidity event.

I would consider myself having succeeded if I can do any or all of the following:

1: Make the GUI that I outlined in my first YC application, an interface intended to make the internet really easy to use for non-traditional users of computers.

2: Cure a major illness or create a major technological breakthrough through my own research lab.

3: Take over Equatorial Guinea.
But determinism is just what happens when you negate your own role in the system with personal apathy; otherwise you have the much more fun realm of scenarios and their associated probabilities, which are in turn largely in flux ...
Advice on user authentication?
Does anyone have advice on an good approach for secure user authentication? Basically, I am looking for the best method without using SSL (if possible).

What I'm thinking now is when a user logs in, send the username and pass as plain text (or is there somehow a way to hash in javascript?) via an asynchronous call, then server side perform a hash on the string and compare it to what is stored in the database. If successful, return logged in status to the browser. Then it is assumed that session is authenticated. Are there other considerations to be mindful of?

Or what about using SSL for the initial handshake, and then use normal HTTP once the user has been authenticated? This way the login text is sent securely, but then the SSL connection can be closed to free resources and improve speed. No protection against main-in-the-middle attacks, but that's probably ok.

Security for this is not critical, but probably more so than other projects I've worked on in the past so I would like to have all bases covered. I figured this site was a good place to tap some expert knowledge.
Empirically the answer seems to be that working hard is a necessary if not sufficient condition for doing great things, and for getting rich in particular.

It's an interesting question why you can't simply find suckers who like to work hard, and get rich off their efforts while you sit back and do nothing. One reason is that they'd have to be stupid to let you do that, and it's not much use having stupid people working for you, no matter how hard they work.

Another reason is that having people work for you is not zero work for you. You have to tell them what to do, and often this requires a great deal of effort. In fact, it's probably not possible to have good ideas about what to do in some field without at some point having worked hard in it yourself.
the unemployed programmer had a problem. "I know", said the programmer, "I'll just learn perl." the unemployed programmer now had two problems.

One of the best programming quotes. Ever.
Would Bush make a good internet entrepreneur?
He's very enthusiastic ... he doesn't seem to know how to quit and he's full of unflappable vision and determined to see his vision through to the bitter end no matter how many billions of people try to dissuade him. And he keeps in constant contact with the folks around him which if you read, "How Not To Die" you know is a critical variable in eventual success.
I've been thinking about this lately myself. I have come to believe there are different levels of success in a startup, which could also be viewed as milestones in a way. Particular startups will only get to a certain level, but attaining any level is a success to some degree. Perhaps, they aren't really levels, because that insinuates a linear process. You can tell from this rambling that I haven't really nailed this thought down yet...I hope someone can build upon it. But off the top of my head:

Level 1: Actually make something that is functional.

Level 2: Actually have someone test it.

Level 3: Actually have someone buy it/use it for real.

Level 4: Actually have the users from the previous Level maintain their use, i.e. convert to real users.

Level 5: Get to some level of profitability.

Level 6: Make a decent amount of money.

Level 7: Make a lot of money, i.e. from an exit event or just large value of company, etc.

I know this includes financial stuff, which you specifically didn't want. However, I think this is inextricably tied to the higher levels of startup success. Obviously in the lower levels, some people may have other metrics beyond other use, like organizational metrics such as hiring employees or making something that grows beyond themselves, i.e. can be passed on.
Unflappable vision is just the kind you don't want.
The date should really be noted in the title of the post.
Bush was a terrible entrepreneur. His success only came because of his family connections. He eventually ended up flipping the Texas Rangers for a respectable amount of money but I give him no credit for that.

His current pursuit cannot succeed, unless his real goal is to keep the America continuously involved in war to generate money for private corporations. It's just sad that American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are paying with their lives. On a scale of absolute evil, it puts Bush only a single order of magnitude below Hitler and Stalin.
Are domains too cheap?
Making domains more expensive makes it much harder for squatters to take good domain names and leave them parked. If the price went up to $50, do you think it would hurt or favor Web 2.0 entrepreneurship?
I suppose one can interpret my question as a bout with "existential crisis". Defining 'success' in the framework of an entire life is more of a philosophical exercise, which I'd rather not go into as of yet.

"1: Make the GUI that I outlined in my first YC application, an interface intended to make the internet really easy to use for non-traditional users of computers." The latter was a great answer and it was the sort of answer I was looking for.

I simply believe that there can be a greater objective in a start-up than a simple exit event. I think eBay was a success cause it had a large impact on shopping online and in fact created an entire new market; Amazon pretty much legitimized online shopping; Hotmail brought web-based email to the masses; TripAdvisor introduced reliable, user-generated opinions for all things related to travel, etc.

I personally believe that a start-up's impact on society and/or business is more important than anything else.
For Web stuff, I pretty much exclusively program in Perl and JavaScript when left on my own. I like both a lot. I really don't get the anti-Perl reputation as portrayed in this article, although as noted it is really old. Maybe it's just my Perl code, but I can pick up code from 10 years ago and understand it fine, and my Perl code never seems to gets out of hand as described in this rant. You always have wonder with rants what the author was actually doing...
Note: it's not that the planes are unsafe. It's just scary that the Fight Club equation is so effective, especially when you have two points of failures.
"... I generally believe that most people with money are generally not stupid. Why, if that is the case, I hear so often that VCs more likely to destroy companies they fund ..."

Human frailty.

After you make a certain amount of money the real aphrodisiac or prime motivator becomes power and control. So (mindless) control is the problem. It has less to do with stupidity, how smart you are as to how well your pre-frontal cortex has been trained to deal with absolute power. There is a lot to be learn't from the ego-less leader. Jim Collins has written about this character trait that propels (or hinders) companies ~ http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/51/goodtogreat.html
Changing the way people work or behave - for the better - or give them more understanding about things they can change.

- Meetup.com is getting people out and into social situations with lots of benefits
- Google maps helps people to find things more quickly without getting lost
- Ebay and Craigslist changed the whole value structure of entire classes of goods and enabled a lot of people to do useful work and earn money they couldn't have before.
- Reddit and related sites are the office-worker's version of talk radio. I'm thinking they're going to have a noticeable affect on politics, hopefully for the better (besides creating a significant drop in productivity of the average programmer.)
- Google.

I'm not sure how social networking sites fit in all of that.

But the revolution isn't anywhere near over yet.
- Government http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/why_congress_ne.ht...
- Medicine - Portable medical records, better understanding of outcomes and genetics can make us all healthier.
- Business - People waste way too much time in offices moving data from one place to another and then trying to balance back to the original. Businesses go broke and partners sue each other because they didn't understand or keep track of or share information. People waste money and time because they didn't understand trends unfolding around them.

And there's a lot more.

And then there's all that money, too.
How can we all write forum titles so interesting that we cancel each other out?
No seriously I want to know.
I really don't think it would matter much. It might change the process of picking a name slightly, but ultimately $50 is still a small cost to pay in the grand scheme of a startup. That puts it still under incorporation costs.
That's a great point of view. Although I excluded money in my question, I am aware that that can only be done in a hypothetical world. I also agree that there are different levels of success. I suppose it is very reasonable to view success as a process rather than an end. The various levels of success which you outline makes sense, however I was wondering whether there was a level beyound money (i.e. Level 7 in your outline) for other entrepreneurs.

I have not yet reached a "Level 7" in my endeavors as an entrepreneur, but I have a feeling that it goes beyond "Level 7".

I guess my suspicion comes from observing those that have already reached "success" in the start-up world. For example, why would PG still work after reaching the elusive "Level 7"/MONEY, why would Steve Jobs keep working, etc....
Take a look at the paper "Dos and Don'ts of Client Authentication on the Web" by Kevin Fu et al. [1]

You should respect your users and always transmit their passwords over an SSL connection during the authentication process. Also only keep a hash of the password on your server. People tend to recycle passwords and by following those two recommendations you help them out quite a bit.

If you follow the paper's advice and mint a Fu Cookie it will have a finite lifetime and contain neither the user's password nor any other sensitive info. Thus for many applications it is not that bad to send it unencrypted over the network.

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/webauth:tr.pdf
Success is when you've significantly improved your users' lives. Great success is when you do this with tons of users. Marlboro is a failure. Wikipedia is a great success.
:: How to be Thousandaire ... or cat
Wow. I dropped my LG on concrete, it skittered about 5 feet and came to rest under my car, and I picked it up and made a call. It was perfectly fine.
I'm voting up all of both of your comments because they made me laugh and I spit a bit of the Hershey bar I was eating on my keyboard.
This doesn't truly answer your objections, but one company I've always been fascinated by is McDonald's. It's always amazed me that they can take relatively uneducated individuals and get them to turn out a hot meal every 90 seconds.

I'm convinced that the real money comes from designing good systems. I once heard that the reason McDonald's color codes the register buttons is so that even employees who are basically illiterate can hit the right button quickly and accurately. Brilliant.

The problem with being stuck in a system like McDonald's is that even though it makes the least skilled/productive people much more efficient, it also puts a cap at how efficient you can ultimately get. I suspect the most successful people are the ones that are able to recognize when they are trapped in someone else's system, especially if it's inefficient, and break out of it.

I suspect that's the key to success in entrepreneurship too, designing good systems. What most people don't realize is that the money doesn't come from mastering systems, but from designing and creating them. The guys running scientology are making a lot more money than the guys trying to get to Thetan level whatever.

Not that designing systems isn't work, but at least it's the kind of work that one might enjoy even if one doesn't enjoy toiling away in traditional institutions.

It's hard to explain well since no one ever talks about this stuff, but hopefully this post sort of makes sense.
Well, if you're measuring absolute evil by lives lost, Bush is about 3 orders of magnitude below Hitler and Stalin...
Excellent, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
They already do this: you want QuickTime for Windows? you must install also iTunes, because both come in the same installer.
Steve should issue everyone an extra $100 credit for being a dunce and going with AT&T
Ya I guess if you can monetize an idea 10,000 entrepreneurs had before you than you can call it a success as well. The smug sense of satisfaction will keep you warm for decades to come.
Marlboro is not a failure. It improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people by helping them live the dream of being a handsome cowboy while they rode the subway to work.
C++ is a horrible language, says Linus Torvalds
I'm always skeptical about approaching the cofounder process that way. I wouldn't recommend doing this with someone you don't know very well. It will strain the bonds of friendship, without that, it's a crapshoot.
I'm voting up all of your comments from now on whenever I come across you because your comment made me laugh and I spit Dr. Pepper out of my nose and now my brain is tingling and I see bright little bubbles popping up all over my field of vision as I sit in the dark writing this.
The Blue Screen of Felony Convictions
Fold Diagrams
Computer Scientists in a snit over Mathematician's criticism
Read Jim Collins' Built to Last. His thesis is that visionary corporations don't result from markets or products or ideas, but from cultures. Entrepreneurs whose companies survive for centuries work very hard to create a whole system of values and beliefs and purpose and then institutionalize them into every aspect of the organization. Clock-builders, not time-tellers.

http://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Compan...
My interpretation of success is when a client/user says, 'Thanks, it works great!' or 'Great job!'

Hearing that sincerely puts a smile on my face and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside
Scala vs. Groovy: static typing is key to performance
If your theory is "build it and they will come", you have to make sure there is a "they"
Relational database pioneer says technology is obsolete
Ahhh ... but you're thinking of "traditional business" ... I'm thinking of a business where you don't need to make revenue and a large company buys you out because of your "strategic value".
Hitler killed at least 10 million people with his genocide, but you could blame many of the 75 million WW2 deaths on him. Stalin killed at least 20 million, possibly closer to 45 million.

As a result of Bush's actions, at least 75,000 died in Iraq and it's 650,000 as of July 2006 if you think the statistical study done by Johns Hopkins is accurate. I haven't read their study so I can't comment on their methodology but I am sure that the 75,000 number is underreporting the deaths in Iraq.

Probably the number is somewhere in between. Let's go with 300,000 and let's say Hitler/Stalin level evil is 30,000,000 deaths. That's two orders of magnitude. It would be closer to three if you distributed the blame for the war across the entire Project for the New American Century.