skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would guess it takes roughly the same effort as ever. That is, the tools exist for a single person to be massively effective now (Skype, IM, eFax, EC2 8-core instances, S3, AdWords/AdSense, turn-key solutions for all sorts of services, more and better programming libraries and frameworks and documentation) but the sophistication required has increased with the learning curve.

You had to work all the time at your start-up back then and you still have to now. The gains in complexity have kept pace with the gains in efficiency in a sort of self-feeding co-evolution.
The initiative impressed me.
No, it's not stupid.
Is it me, or does the microscope look like a Mr. Coffee?
I am very happy to tell you that it already exists!!!!!

http://www.bizfriendz.com/

The part that sold me is that they spelled friends with a "z".

Seriously though: have you heard of gobignetwork.com? cofoundr.com? I think the ratings you mention would be meaningless. I don't think a social network is the best way to organize an event. I don't think social networks are good ways to meet cofounders. I think existing networks solve your other problems. Sorry to godzilla your tokyo, I may be wrong and/or stupid.
I've been contemplating on whether to compete or not in the competition this Saturday. (Who doesn't want a free t-shirt?)

This would be my first time competing in a programming/algorithm solving contest.
The big problem with this product for bloggers is that bloggers won't get any search traffic from their comments.

Search engines either don't look inside of iframes, or point to the iframe's URL if they do.
Sorry, I have no association with the site.
You can apply on the site, though.
Well, I don't know anything about the size or statistics of your industry. I don't read comments, so I can't really buy anything.

Your design is ok, but why not make it a little more comic-bookish? Maybe get a designer to give you something similar to the cover of Amory Wars you have at the top there.

In retail your success is going to come down to things we YC denizens can't see from a glance. Prices, selection, service.
TargetContact Goes Live!
Hey guys, i've been working diligently these past months to bring you TargetContact.

Here is some marketing blurb from our corporate site:
Newsletters have long been a powerful marketing tool that builds brand awareness and offers improved communication with customers and prospects. But, busy professionals can't afford the time it takes to create a professional looking piece. The solution is TargetContact!

In 2007, TargetContact, Inc. set out to create a simple and affordable marketing platform for professionals looking to increase their visibility. The objective was to create something that required very little time and ongoing maintenance, but provided real results. The founders of TargetContact knew that if they could create this tool and offer an engaging monthly newsletter that professionals could put their own brand on, it would be very valuable.

Today, TargetContact serves Insurance Agents, Attorneys, Accountants, Loan Officers, Realtors, Consultants and many other types of professionals nationwide. With its easy to use campaign manager and engaging newsletter, TargetContact provides its customers with a high value marketing tool at an affordable price.

sign-up and let me know what you think. i'm dying to get some feedback! We've put so much effort into making this app really solid, useable and affordable. At the moment we're offering a 30 day free trial so if you actually have a need for something like this you get 30 days to evaluate it.

./rm
Apparently a typo, but I saw that and laughed and was going to note it here as well. :-)
We just went live, this is the culmination of the last 6 mo of my life, hopefully you approve :) It would be great to get some feedback, below is some marketing blurb from our corporate site to give you an idea of what it is we do:

Newsletters have long been a powerful marketing tool that builds brand awareness and offers improved communication with customers and prospects. But, busy professionals can't afford the time it takes to create a professional looking piece. The solution is TargetContact!

In 2007, TargetContact, Inc. set out to create a simple and affordable marketing platform for professionals looking to increase their visibility. The objective was to create something that required very little time and ongoing maintenance, but provided real results. The founders of TargetContact knew that if they could create this tool and offer an engaging monthly newsletter that professionals could put their own brand on, it would be very valuable.

Today, TargetContact serves Insurance Agents, Attorneys, Accountants, Loan Officers, Realtors, Consultants and many other types of professionals nationwide. With its easy to use campaign manager and engaging newsletter, TargetContact provides its customers with a high value marketing tool at an affordable price.
The market is about $500 million/year. We're not going to get VC funding, because there's no chance to become a billion dollar player. However, we'd be more than happy to get 2% of the market, and make a 10% profit!

As far as why the design isn't overly comic-booky: we did a ton of customer and competitor research before we picked the feature list or started writing the code, or doing the design, and we found that one objection many people have to comic book stores is that they feel like ghettos: they're perceived as not welcoming if you're not already part of the subculture. With that in mind, we consciously chose a design that was fresh and exciting, but didn't echo the super-hero motifs and stylings that many other comic book websites use.
Not personalized recommendations, no.

A question for YC-ers: does this sound like a valuable feature? My inclination is to think "no", but I might be wrong...
For what it's worth, I like the design a lot. Was there some kind of process you went through to get it looking like this? Did you prototype and show users, do some sketches, photoshop, etc?
While there may be some indexing issues, it is due to another matter altogether. The comments are not in iframes.
Rails/Django/PHP/etc. developer needed for a medically related web startup.
Hey all,

I'm Kyro Beshay, and I've paired up with a fellow news.yc'er Dustin Curtis in hopes of pursuing a startup. We are both aspiring entrepreneurs who are also very interested in the medical field. Thus, our idea is a medically based web service, and we're looking for a developer.

I will handle all of the business/logistical/creative aspects, and will also continue to pickup programming to aid the developer, and Dustin is a very talented designer who will design and code the front-end. Examples of Dustin's designs can be seen at http://www.foreigncookie.com , http://www.itsalltaken.com , http://www.quarkfactor.com and app.itsalltaken.com/index.php

We're looking for a Rails/Django/PHP/etc. developer to become a cofounder of a potentially awesome startup that, we think, can revolutionize healthcare. We know that the news.yc community is full of charismatic, talented, and smart people, and we're hoping to spark interest in you. To be a cofounder, you must be able to communicate well, be incredibly motivated, be creative, be open to opposing suggestions, and have all of the other characteristics that make a great leader. Those who lack a taste for sushi need not apply.

We're two funny, smart, creative guys who genuinely want to change healthcare and help people.

If interested, email me at: kbeshay@gmail.com or chat me up on yahoo/aol: hybridxaos, just don't ask me what I'm wearing or to webcam.

Hope to hear from you soon,
Kyro and Dustin.
A Case of the Mondays
Are you a start-up person?
Office Building Lit By 100% LED Light
My university had the usual ACM algorithmic programming contests, but the ACM and UPE (CS honor society) student groups also put on other "alternative" programming contests, which I found more fun.

Last year they had a 24 hour programming contest to make the best app based around a certain theme... "a series of tubes":
http://uscp24.com/

My team made a crime tracking web app for my school, which had nothing to do with tubes except we called it TOOBS: http://toobs.tlrobinson.net/

This year they're doing a two day contest called "Code for a Cause" where teams make accessibility software for the disabled:
http://ss12.info/
It's clean but I feel it looks too much like netflix. Suggestion: Put the black splotch on red effect to one or both of the sides.
Hey, YC news doesn't do homework.
Thanks!

You can read a lot more about our design process on our old blog ( http://heavyink.com/blog/ ), but the short version is:

1) come up with basic idea for website
2) put up a survey
3) ping comic bloggers; get 400 people to take survey
4) narrow down feature list
5) get a UI consultant to help us design how the features get spread across the various pages (lots of "scenario" stuff: "say that you're a young woman shopping for manga. What do you type? Where do you click?").
6) hand the "wireframes" from the UI consultant off to our graphic designer
7) review the sketches; decide to pick a new graphic designer
8) get sketches back from second graphic designer; tell him "No, make the color scheme more like Netflix". Repeat this last step in 100 different steps: feedback on size of elements, etc. The engineering team provided the feedback, the graphic designer provided the expertise with fonts, layout, etc.
9) done!

...well, actually, nothing is every done. We've got to revamp the tabbed navigation, the RSS customization buttons, and a ton of other stuff...but it was well enough done to go live!
Cool. This and the salaries for your employees were all self funded from your other venture without debt?
ISP AT&T Considering Content-Recognizing Anti-Piracy Filter for Entire Network
Ask YC: Where do you guys find designers for your projects?
I installed the beta this afternoon and so far it's told me exactly what I knew already: I spend too much time on this site.

Noprocrast is handy, but simply being kicked off the web isn't enough. What I /really/ need is a program threatening to format my disk if I'm not productive.
I accidentally down voted you - How do I fix that ?
Interesting. Its been a while since I did any testing on the MacBook. Thanks.
Problem is that Ubuntu hasn't updated Firefox to 2.0.0.9 in the repositories yet.
Yeah, I agree regarding the search results being confusing. It didn't turn out exactly as I wanted, but its on my ever-growing list of tasks to improve it.
Thats awesome. If you sign up and rate the kind of stuff you used to like, as well as stuff you specifically don't like... the recommendation system should give you some decent suggestions. (If it doesn't, I suck.) They're not as good as they will be, because our data set is still fairly limited, but its getting better daily.
New Company Innovation & Idea Application
I also installed the beta this afternoon and it told me something pleasantly surprising: I spent about 95% of the 2 hours on my computer working. "VMWare Player" is basically the only bar that's visible.

Noprocrast is great. I'm sure that if I'd received the beta invitation yesterday, it would've shown me wasting hours here.
I'm not sure if search engine indexing for comments is too big of a deal anyway. I still can't think of any way for them to generate the comments in a search engine friendly way though. Search engine bots don't render Javascript right?
Not a blog, not a wiki... BricaBox: Wordpress for Structured Content
no way to undo, usually if there is an accidental/inappropriate up/downvote the community is good about self-correcting.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2007-07-2...

Here's a USA Today article on Salesforce. Under the second subheading they say,

"Salesforce was born in March 1999 in cramped, adjoining apartments atop San Francisco's picturesque Telegraph Hill. Benioff, still employed at Oracle, lived in a condo. Fellow co-founders Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez set up shop next door. Computer cables ran between the apartments through windows. 'It was the Gold Rush era for tech start-ups then,' Harris recalls."

And if you Google on Parker Harris at least, you can find him described as a co-founder.

By the way, SAIC is an interesting one. The main guy founded it with "a handful of scientists" and one page describes someone as a "Vice Co-Founder" of SAIC. "Vice co-founder!" That's harsh.
Google Only Ahead Of Microsoft In Search: Ballmer
great product/service but as of now - not great for stealth mode
You're in a pretty cool area. Like I said from a previous post though, I would suggest that you either talk to the guys from ComicVine (to see what they did wrong- they're now working on a another startup even though ComicVine is doing fabulously well) or figure out a way to beat them (I would suggest cribbing the stuff you like from them and then just making it better)..

As someone who read too many comic books when young, the digital comic phenomenon is really gaining serious steam. If you could let people upload their fan drawings and do licensing with the major publishers, you could really get a better in. Comicvine did not have that and as a result was never approached by Marvel or DC to acquire (the two companies just were pissed).
How You Sleep is Who You Are
... scroll down to the title text, or 'Psychology' (sorry 'bout that).
I second Rob's recommendation of DejaVu. And for those using X11 bitmap fonts, Terminus.
Good Luck Guys!
Man. Uncov makes me laugh extremely hard every time there is a new post. Its funny, and thats why I read it (laff=goodforthesoul). Ted has a sense of humor that makes you think. After his beatdown of Zoho, I was hooked.
Hey, good luck guys... send me an email/google chat invitation if you want to talk some time, now is a great time to be getting into the medical/biotech field.
Pretty much.

SmartFlix is profitable, but it has debt.

All of the salaries, rent, startup inventory, consultant fees, trademark fees, legal fees, etc. for HeavyInk were payed for by profits from SmartFlix.

That said, SmartFlix itself has debt. Why? Because it's really capital intensive. If a given DVD rents out once every 60 days, and we make $4 in profit on a rental, and the DVD costs $60, then an upfront investment of $60 breaks even two years later. So: SmartFlix has incurred a bit of debt (half of it real debt owed to banks and other small lendors, and half of it paper debt, in the form of promissory notes to engineers who were on half salary for six months, etc.).

The capital intensive nature of SmartFlix was fine, but it means that it's hard to grow past a certain size - in the absence of VCs rushing to give us $1 or $5 million (and, frankly, they're right not to - SmartFlix isn't going to have the return that they're looking for), then growth slows to the rate at which we can purchase inventory with profits.

...which is one of the reasons that we looked for a second startup idea that leveraged a lot of our core competencies (ecommerce, fulfillment, datamining, etc.) but did not require nearly as much cash tied up in inventory.
There are two books on this, the better one was 'The Wisdom Paradox' (my bad! correction from earlier version of this comment), the less good, slower, less medical + informative was 'The Mature Mind'. IIRC from reviews (I only got 1/4 way through the first book), the theory is, that the right brain starts being used more (and it's been fed longer, now) so that, as you age, while you're maybe less 'whip smart', you have 10,000 shortcuts and indeed as you say, you see the bigger picture better.

Ugh - actually I couldn't swear the one that impressed me as 'sharper' was the first, I believe so though. I could use some of my old 'whip smarts', such as they were :(.
True Knowledge Launches Natural Language Search Engine
I've posted before about this, so I apologize to anyone reading this for the second time. I'm currently working on a startup similar to this, based around the groups who were not accepted by ycombinator. A place to demo your startup, get feedback, and find co-founders. Also to find a place to stay if the group is planning on moving to SV, or anywhere for that matter. There are a few other features I'm currently implementing also. Overall, its just a place to keep each other motivated and help one another out. Nothing putting down ycombinator, but just a place to connect and share. I was going to have it up and running this week, however, I've been low on time lately. I should have something within the next week or two though.
I find most of my general theories from when I was young were generally quite good, but slightly naive. My father was a mechanic, and I always wondered why cars didn't have generators used for braking. Regenerative braking became a great idea for cars powered by an electric motor, not so useful for gasoline powered cars. I thought about what it would be like to live forever, and I figured you would go through every possibility of an ever growing world. This is not so different from what I later learned about quantum physics.
There is no way to delete your account on IILWY, so I emailed them and asked them to do it for me and they refused. It seems like they have some serious issues.
My god, Dustin is a wonderful designer. Your work is beautiful. Good luck.
Instead of having that huge arrow to get people to install the OpenSearch plugin (or at least in addition to the arrow), you should use OpenSearch autodiscovery. When you go to a site with autodiscovery implemented, the logo box of the search bar glows blue. Go to Wikipedia and look at your search bar to get an idea of what happens.

Most users probably either don't notice or don't know what the blue glow means, so I can understand keeping the arrow, but you might as well add the autodiscovery too. Someone might do something nifty someday by crawling the web and scraping those autodiscovery links to build some sort of meta-search engine... that still wouldn't be as useful as Google, but it'd still be nifty.

http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Auto...
Friends are useful. You might want to go back and read the story of iLike's scaling issues when the Facebook API came out. If everyone hated them, no one would've lent them servers, and they wouldn't have benefited from all the free exposure that got them.
I really really liked the yellow search bar, but I think you should make it point to something more useful than adding a firefox search. I personally don't use that for anything but very major searches(google, ebay, occasionally wikipedia). what if you used that bar to point to a sales special or something that can drive revenue or would be really appealing to users.
It's articles like these which make me want a vote down button.
Surely music-sharing software would evolve to encrypt files even before they finished installing it, no?
Bittorrent is well on its way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption

It boggles my mind that AT&T is even considering this, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
I'm not sure pirates are that flexible, but I agree circumnavigation is trivial. I think lots of people are pirates mainly out of convenience. If decrypting were harder than unzipping, people might not use it.

I was thinking about movies and realized that one way to stop pirates is to leapfrog a generation of HD quality. If movies were 3600x2400, even with h264 they would take eons to download. Also, they would take a great deal of time to recompress [compression is much more cpu intensive than decompression]. This makes the amateur pirate's life harder. There would be a reason to buy/rent the disk. Avoiding piracy through innovation ... what a thought.
>I was thinking about movies and realized that one way to stop pirates is to leapfrog a generation of HD quality.

That would definitely do it to a certain extent, but the vast majority of people right now aren't interested in super-HD. HD media is catching on slowly enough because most people don't seem to care about the difference between HD-DVD and DVD.

It couldn't stop piracy, it would just end up differentiating based on whether or not people thought 1.4 gig .avi's are good enough.
Buxfer for Beer. Built on Twitter
Interesting, but "cracked" may be a bit strong. It only works if the attacker has already gained access to the process through some other vulnerability.
Jason and Daniel.
Sirtris Tests Fountain of Youth Pill
xOperator: combines advantages of social network websites with instant messaging.
Good idea and description - too bad the description isn't on your website (typically i click on the link first before i go to comments).

btw how do u deal with potential abusers of your service (a la spammer)?
maybe you can collaborate with cofoundr.com?
Cool.

Although I thought it was going to track how much money you spent on beer, which would mean I would have to ignore it just as hard as Rescuetime to avoid painful self-knowledge . . .
No idea is stupid... just keep trying and learn from your mistakes.

I think you might be on the right track if you're thinking of new ways to find people to co-found with. Cofoundr exists, and News.YC exists, but have you ever wondered why people still complain about finding cofounders? Obviously, the problem still exists.

Some thoughts:

- Instead of a demo day in your area, build a site where its easy for hackers to upload their Web apps and show them off to all the other users. You pay for the hosting and handle all the tedious server stuff, and I simply upload my code, click "Go", and the app goes live for a day or two. Users can upvote the projects that they think are the coolest, and hackers accumulate popularity points.

- Maintain a "Top-List" of "best entrepreneurs", ranked by the number of votes that each person gets on Demo Days. Perhaps categorize this by the type of product each entrepreneur is interested in building. So if there is a Top 10 list for entrepreneurs building stuff that has something to do with mobile software, and I'm #2 on the list and you are #1, hey that looks like a promising team. At least, it's better than going blindly.

- In addition to the Demo Day software, build a Web app that makes it easy for entrepreneurs/programmers to keep track of their hobby projects online and constantly display them to the world for everyone to see. Imagine a place where thousands of hackers all have their hobby stuff online. So I do a search for "mobile software" on the site, and I find 10 people that did some hacks for fun and are showing off their work. If I'm looking for a cofounder, I would contact the person who I thought had the best work.

Maybe the 3 things I listed here are crap, but my point is that you should constantly reiterate on a seemingly "dumb idea" because eventually it might turn into a winner.
The Man Who Planted Trees [video]
Knowing the truth hurts, but beer makes the hurt go away.. Oh, the dilemma.

;)
yeah you're looking at the actual application there is a corporate site www.targetcontact.com. the reason you didn't get comments unfortunately is because i failed to read the submission instructions hahaha
The difference between a degree and an education
I've gotten recommendations from several people...and none of the recommended designers were all that great. The one I use all the time I met on the general interest town mailing list - we are two libertarians in a sea of Massachusetts Democrats. We ended up getting together for poker first, became friends next, and now we farm out tons of design work to him.

Note: no guarantees that this process will work for you.
How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?
Useful insight, though I found this quote to be... interesting: "At Microsoft we try very, very hard to not release half-baked software."

Then again they do have a much harder task than Apple.
Useful insight, though I found this quote to be... interesting:
"At Microsoft we try very, very hard to not release half-baked software."
Crack into the server and change the code. The password is Japanese for "Red Castle".