skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good start..but IMHO it is a number of features away from being a must have..Somethings I would like to see:

1. Some of my friends email me with multiple addresses, there should be a way to merge them into one person

2. I should be able to click on a converstion and delete the entire thread

3. I should be able to sort my contacts by rank

I really like the scheduling thing..probably not hard to implement but very useful.
Can I manually connect people?

Please don't take my views too seriously, afterall I have only used the product for 1 day.
> My product is a service for other sites to re-use

If it adds value to the website for the webmaster then maybe you should not split anything from ads. The value would be in the new feature.
Here's a company that is building something users want, and has a better chance of making money from its users than all those web2.0 companies.

Enterprise might not be sexy, but is sure pays the bills!
I can't even begin to explain how stupid you look by bashing something you obviously have not even tried to use.

Do you have any idea how much time an average Joe spends in front of Outlook? It is easily 2nd most popular (or should I say 'used'?) application after web browser.
run4, Thanks for the feedback. While I agree with you in principle, I find this hard to quantify. If we succeed, I will owe my success to the utility company for providing potable water and my webhost for hosting my site. I'm not sure, if I use the success yardstick that way, whether it really leads to realistic compensation. It's as much about what the market will bear and going rate for a developer in some ways. That's why I'm fishing on here for more thoughts or norms.
Xobni guys, I have been very curious about what you were doing.

I just installed it at work. Awesome! My email (actually, Outlook) does suck less now. I can finally search! ... which I don't need to do much anymore since most of the stuff I need automatically shows on the right.

I hope you do well. I hate email so much that personally need you to stay alive to help me deal with it :-)
Tandem Entrepreneurs - a new type of VC
Except emachineshop can do 3 dimensions... Full CNC mill (or 3d printer), rather than just a 2-d laser cutter.

OTOH, this site has a built-in etsy-like marketplace.
I like it, its good. You could work on the name though. :)
"bashing something you obviously have not even tried"

Yeah, just like heroin, regular work and sex with old people.

Have you even tried bashing things you didnt try or did you just do, what you condemn?
It wouldn't surprise me if a very large majority of YC applicants did NOT go to the Ivy League.

Regardless of whether students/graduates of those schools are smarter, from what I've heard there is much less of an entrepreneurial spirit in the Ivies.

If anything, I would think YC has a bias towards schools like MIT, Berkeley, CalTech, Stanford, UIUC, etc., none of which are in the Ivy League.

(And by bias I don't mean an admissions bias, simply that a greater percentage of accepted teams go to these schools)
Jeff Clavier Launches $12 Million Venture Fund
Here's to replacing fiat currencies with oil-backed currencies (directly)
Thanks Xobni. I always felt outlook was broken. I hated using it. The search is terrible and finding email address and phone numbers is a pain. Being that I am forced to use outlook at work, I was really excited to try out Xobni. I installed it as soon as I could download it.

I found the search amazing and email address information was very helpful. For example phone numbers are easier to find now.

Though, the social features seem elaborate, unnecessary and bulky. I am not interested in that right now. Maybe I'll find it useful later on.

Overall, great product. fast, effective, and useful. Keep up the good work!
Speaking from someone who attended one, it is very easy to go to an Ivy League school and not excel simply because you (and everyone else there) are assumed to excel because you attend one.

As a point of a comparison take China. China's most acclaimed school Peking University is fiendishly difficult to get into but gives a ridiculously easy education once you are there. Still, Peking U grads are able to go most places they want. Schools with a science/math/engineering focus seem to do better at maintaining a higher standard, but their students frequently come out looking like they just popped out of a cookie-cutter - not even a hint of an independent idea.

A fuller exploration question is of course more complicated than this, and would have to address at least the following questions: Why did the core curriculum of the West die? Could it be replaced with a broad and rigorous humanities education or are broad and rigorous contradictory? If not, how can they productively be combined?
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Facebook Considered Harmless
Free online web template generator
I thought this was the basic premise for meetup.com ?
He is obviously lying. This is not even a debatable point.

It's called spin. A representative of the business is giving a half-credible excuse for reverting to a process that will be unpopular but that will also generate more revenue. Politicians don't change their stances on abortion because of changes of heart...they do it because it will net more votes

For whatever reason it's taboo for a press release to say "we're taking this course of action because it's more profitable", unless you're talking to stockholders and not users, because 1. all business actions are taken with profitability, short term or long, in mind, so it goes without saying 2. you would piss off your users who care only what you give to them and rarely at all whether you're making money or not
After reading every comment on this thread, I have determined that all posts from Thomas are written using the same pattern.

"Several sentences of very informative information and background on the topic of security for those non-experts (vast majority of us).

One sentence calling the parent poster an embarrassing retard."

Seriously though, I appreciate the insight into the topic and enjoyed your reply post to the one at Coding Horror. Thanks to you I finally understand the reason a decent salt matters, and I'll be sure to ditch SHA1 for bcrypt when I get home. You can rest assured I'm not trying to design my own password system (for anything public)... I was just wondering, are there other systems that do authentication without actually sending the password over the wire besides the supposedly-hard-to-implement Stanford one that may or may not be patented? Bonus points if it's open source...
This one is missing quite a bit of the graphic stuff that Zenter had (but seems to have lost for Google Presentations). Rotations of text and images and browsing of Flickr and Google Images for images with drag and drop. Font handling in Zenter was also awesome to behold. It tried to replicate some of the really hard stuff in PowerPoint, that this one doesn't (yet).

Looks very slick, though. Definitely a contender, particularly if Google Presentations doesn't bring in all of that functionality that we were seeing in Zenter before it got sucked up by Google. The design is nice and clean, too, which is a plus.
i think it looks sweet. i was just thinking about how long it will be until they get bought...then i was thinking about who would buy them. anyone but microsoft? i'm guessing they will try to roll out for other email clients though? then who? interesting to think about...
That sounds pretty close to what I'm going for, actually. The solution is, of course, to define a set of building blocks that is orthogonal but easy to use, so that clever artisans will be able to combine in many different ways. (like the 25 different blades, with 25 different handles, etc from the article). My ideas are a little different, but mostly in the details and what sort of controls I'm hoping to give the artisans.
I don't think the name is all that bad. All the good ones are taken, so you've got to go outside the realm of good spelling to get something even close to appropriate.
What you're doing seems to make sense. If this becomes popular, microsoft could conceivably buy it.

I've just been using it for a bit, and there's one thing I find disconcerting. Let's say I click on "Joe Blow", and then I see "Conversations with Joe (150)". Okay, so I look at these "conversations"...now, maybe other companies are different, but as soon as you get more than a few people in an office, the bulk of the emails have 20 people in the To: [] section. Thus, if Jane Doe sends 20 people an email, among whom was me and Joe Blow, then all of a sudden there's a "Conversation" between me and Joe.

Not the case.

Because of that, the tool seems to add quite a bit of noise. Maybe make an option for "Types of conversation", "From Joe to me", and "From Me to Joe".
"I like the way you think kid... here is 10 million dollars!"

"By the way, can we make it 4.0? 3.0 is so 1999"

-Anonymous VC
You're sharing value in something that can't possibly be defined yet. There is no market rate for that, that's my point. Web Designers don't get "x" value, because some designers might be as valuable as the founders, might actually be the founders or might just be a contract job. You've got a scale from 0% to 100% right there.

The only thing you can really do is equate the risk/value proposition in a way that seems fair for the amount of risk they are putting in. Are they working without pay? Are they doing this part time? Are they making suggestions that are helping you to decide the direction of the company? All of these are variables that you need to weigh.

Offering a piece of your company is a not normally a form of primary employee compensation. If you are looking at the designer as simply an employee, you'd be better off paying them, otherwise, you should IMO, not consider your designer as simply an employee.

Does that make more sense?
this is a good opportunity for new start-ups - YCombinator should tie-up with then to fund their portfolio companies ...
seems like it would be easy to spook Angel investors

My experience is the opposite: since angels use their own money, they answer to no one and can stick with you (assuming they continue to believe in your vision), even as the environment changes.

OTOH, VC firms (or any other organization with limited partners) are subject to more oversight and 3rd party scrutiny, and are much more likely to follow the herd.

There are, of course, exceptions in both cases.
Why do email analytics matter? Why does it matter how many emails I sent/received from a given person?
Nice work! Regarding your application to YC, I'd guess that if this were a past project, and now you were doing something that wasn't this, YC would accept you in a heartbeat. You guys could even be one of the "leave the 'what will you make?' field blank" groups, and get accepted.

But, YC already funded a very similar company. I wonder if they would have reservations about funding a competitor. Perhaps not, given that Zenter has been acquired, but I don't know.

I was going to say that another issue is going head-to-head against Google. But I now don't think that's so much of a problem. Yahoo and Microsoft are going to need their own versions of Powerpoint, and I think they'd totally snap this up.
1> no obvious demo button to see the tool in action

2> why I gotta register

3> can I upload powerpoints?

That's a review of your web site, not your web application, but that's kind of the point - I didn't get to your application, because your web site is in the way.

Demo, on the home page, using your own tool to pitch me your own tool.
I am one of the many forced to use outlook for work. However, everyone I've interacted with uses web Outlook, not the installed client, myself included. Am I right that Insight does not work on the web version?

If so I might actually consider installing Outlook on my laptop just to get it, which is saying something. I would much rather not have to guess which page Ivanov is in my entire past history of alphabetized-by-sender messages.
I like swearing. I swear all the time. Fuck is the most elegant and multi-useful word universally known. In fact, I love swearing so much I even swear at my own grandmother. But it was funny.

The tone and voice of the author doesn't carry well. It's not funny. It's not satirical. Just a guy swearing about doom and gloom. Uncov, Flocksucks, and even Valleywag, this is not.
To shed some light on our strategy for Xobni Insight:

What we've really been working on is a general platform for aggregating communication data (and on your machine, not ours!). The current features you see in Xobni are just a few ideas implemented on top of our platform. We will do more.

We say it's beta for a reason (this is not going to be gmail-esque "it's always beta"), because we plan to add many fixes/features/platforms as we learn more about the needs of our (hopefully) growing user base. We really appreciate feedback, whether it is a problem report (support@xobni.com) or a new feature idea (beta@xobni.com).

Thanks for sticking with us everyone!
Techcrunch40: Getting Funded Panel
Thanks for that,

1> Well, you can try it, pressing the Try it link ( you're right it should be a button).

2> You need o be registered to access your presentations, editing, and managing them. (We should also explain it too).

3> No, you can't upload powerpoints yet.

Have you tried the presentation editor?
When the author says Ivy League, I took it to imply Ivy-League-caliber schools.
I thought this was hilariously cynical. Of course, I might just be in a cynical mood reading this at my day job.
We are working on the graphic stuff right now, we have awesome ideas for it, I think we should have it done in a couple of weeks.

I think that one of the things that makes us different is the ability to edit presentations between a group of people in real time.

We worked a lot on the design too, we believe that a good tool must have a nice design and be easy to use.
You can ignore it... you can join it... or you can whine about it.

Which one's the least productive?
The Community of TechCrunch
Someone please make this meme die. We are NOT IN A BUBBLE. Most of the country is not in good economic condition. The stock market is rocky, and is not inflated. There no parallels to 1999 here. VC investment != a bubble. Say it to yourself a few times.
It's BS like this that helps actually create a downturn. Repeat the idea enough in the media, and people will naturally begin acting like it's a reality -- making it a reality.

The real cause? Our need to punish ourselves for doing well. "We deserve a good downturn right about now. Things have been too good. We need to feel some solid pain to keep ourselves in check."
It is always good to be challenged with the 'we are in a bubble' postings simply because a bubble can't happen so long as people are willing and able to practically evaluate the functionality of their own technologies. At least, that's what I believe Buffett would say.
an illicit social network / market could be huge.

host it in Sweden / Amsterdam / offshore (or wherever it's legal).

not worth the hassle from the feds though =)
Yahoo Pipes?
The "Try It" link should be huge, in the middle of the page, and not below the fold.
That article is hella helpful!
Not bad -- or off base -- until he goes all "I'm smarter than you" at end.
Yes but the UIs are still horrible.

Someone needs to make something so easy a retarted monkey could use the thing and probably not even realize "torrents" were powering the thing.
It probably doesn't. What matters more is how you use email. I recommend GTD method (after personally trying half a dozen methods, GTD works the best). If you're on a Mac, try http://indev.ca/MailTags.html
I see pre zen tit on the front page image.
Problem Scenario:

I'm a hacker. That's just how I roll. Last night I built a "digg/reddit for pictures" type of site. No sweat. But now I need someone to maintain/market/add content / etc. It's a huge pain, and I'd much rather stick to coding.

What would be nice:

Some kind of site/forum/network/etc that connects hacktrepreneurs with talented and/or cheap marketing people. (sometimes you get what you pay for; sometimes the work is just not that hard)
James Hong's Reply to Valleywag's post of this story

Tim,
Instead of just making assumptions about what I was thinking, you could have just asked. We don't keep anything we do at HOTorNOT a secret, in fact we're tragically transparent.
Were the assumptions I made 3 months ago wrong? I'm not sure, they might be.. but even if they were wrong, I would have no problem admitting it. Sometimes we are right from the get go.. sometimes we are wrong and have to readjust.

The truth is that I still don't think an advertising model was the wrong thing to pursue. The fact that revenue was already 1/3 of what subscription revenues used to be was a promising sign, because that was all generated using Adsense... selling direct would likely have landed us making more than before. Of course, it would have required a lot of hardwork, but I think it would ultimately have worked out.

No, this decision was not based on business models, it was based on us realizing that worrying about your user experience is more important than how you monetize. If we lost all our users because of the spammers, it wouldn't really matter which business model we chose to apply, right?

As for other free sites being able to deal with the spammer problem while we were not, I really can't say why. Maybe they're smarter than us, or in most cases, still too small to attract the attention of spammers... or maybe they do have a problem but it's just not apparent because they don't talk about it?

I don't know. I don't have insight into their systems, and it is always a presumptuous and unintelligent thing to do to make conclusions about other people's businesses without having any data.
So was I wrong 3 months ago? I don't know yet. For all I know, I might be wrong NOW, switching back. What I do know is that until we are confident that we can effectively fight the spammers off without having to charge, we have to keep charging.

But lets be honest.. I'm not going to feel too bad about that, either. Even when I was in the 9th grade flipping burgers at Burger King for $3 an hour, I wouldn't have complained about paying $6 a month for a service that connected me with lots of hotties.. and we got a lot of feedback from women that any guy too cheap to pay $6 was probably not the kind of guy they wanted to date anyway (our system only requires 1 of 2 people to be a paid member for them to communicate.. so even under a subscription model, our site remains effectively free for most women)
james
I'm not sure the point of this rant. Let me summarize what I got out of this:

This author thinks we're in a bubble because:
1) the startups having unique names
2) you can't change text size of widgets
3) nobody codes as well as he does

I wasn't convinced he was right until he starting swearing... then I was sure he knew what he was talking about.
That's a good one, I'll start working on it right now!

Maybe I should make also a Sign Up button next to it.

(Try It) (Sign Up)

I think of placing those buttons below the tag line.

Thanks.
-a real estate aggregator to provide people with historical price trends on given property. Eliminate the information asymmetry between the real estate agent and the buyer.

-public and uploadable data warehouse, a la Many Eyes and Swivel, but with better graphic capability, something along the lines of trendalyzer. Design it in a way that rewards contributors with points to build resident 'data experts' and to enable referencing and storing of different people's analysis.

-web-based statistical software like SAS. allow sharing of programs through repository as well as collaborative editing.
VentureBeat: Mint: The easiest way to manage your personal finances
Business Strategy: Controlling the Choke Points
business strategy article
Valleywag: I'm too sexy for my install script
Why Yahoo really bought Zimbra
VentureBeat: Email company Xobni launches, may steal Techcrunch prize
Did they bother talking to any Netflix Shipping Center pickers? I'd imagine that's a significant chunk of employees/temps that they employ.

Via: http://www.hackingnetflix.com/2007/02/working_for_net.html

"After working at Netflix for a while, it starts to get boring and it really brings your emotion down since there's not many interactions with your fellow coworkers, like for me, sometimes I feel really shitty after shipping for about three and a half hours and that's why I try to do many talking, walking during our breaks."

Just a small sample size, but I could imagine that job sucks a pretty big one, especially if your manager/quota-bot is on your ass 24/7.
It's hard to find a line of reasoning in this to refute. Always a bad sign.
Congratulations Xobni team!
What Valleywag has discovered is that they don't have to bother getting things right in order to generate a lot of page views. They're like a troll in that respect.

I wonder if they started out with this plan, or if they just discovered it by being careless and noticing it didn't hurt their traffic.
> "The flimsy excuses for not sharing the massive profits with employees in the past ... "

Kind of a socialist sentiment, doncha think?

From what I know of the whole deal, these two dudes built the core of the business in 7-30 days, and layered in the payment/dating stuff later on. (pretty obvious/inevitable)
You are right, and this is a personal failing. Experience suggests I'm unlikely to overcome it. For the record, I don't think any of you are embarassing retards. But after reading comments here and elsewhere --- "that's OK, I'm making my salt 256 bits!" --- I fear that some of the password systems you will devise will be embarassingly retarded.

As for the parent comment: I just really like that picture.

Regarding challenge-response alternatives to SRP: I don't think these work well on the web.

Reason 1: on almost anything unencumbered by the Thomas Wu patent, you're going to have to store cleartext passwords on the server, which is probably worse than forcing clients to send passwords over the wire.

Reason 2: challenge-response only works if you feed the login page and Javascript dependencies over SSL (otherwise, the same attacker who can sniff passwords can hijack and man-in-the-middle logins). But if you trust SSL to feed the login page, why not trust it with the actual passwords?
They certainly aren't the first "journalists" to use the trolling tactic. Dvorak and Orlowski are two other examples that come to mind.
Mm, yes, and Donna Bogatin. She was beating on us for a while, but she seems to have stopped. What's distinctive about Valleywag is that it's a site and not just an individual.

Maybe we should make up a name for them. Journotrolls?
We take requests! I'm working on this with my partners. Thanks for the suggestion.
You joke, but there could be startups there. None of those features are done perfectly yet. If a startup could do one of those things amazingly well, they'd possibly find a good business in there too. Bookmarks in particular is a rich area.
Helping people understand and improve their finances is something that could really make a difference.

I'm curious to hear feedback from any other Mint users here.
Your timing could be better.
Flock, the Social Web Browser: Coming Soon to a Computer Near You
Early this week, San Francisco-based Flock showed off a Web browser designed specifically for users of social networking sites, and the company claims the software is the first of its kind.
I like this. All products should expose the people and personalities behind them. I hate the idea that products simply emerge from faceless cogs in a monolithic corporation.

In addition to giving a product more personality, it will keep developers more personally involved in the product and users due to the greater sense of ownership and identity.
Saw the demo video (I don't use Outlook, so I can't try the beta). It looks pretty cool. I may yet end up eating my words...