skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that many features are going to cost more than one user could reasonably donate, and a lot of others are interrelated.

If you're set on this idea, I'd recommend looking into the Street Performer Protocol, which basically says that people pay for feature X.. If it's not implemented, they all get their money back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Performer_Protocol
how about you just make it and then try to make money off of it :)
I meant allow all the users to contribute to creating a single feature. If you had 50k users and needed 5g 10% of users only have to give $10 to reach the goal.
Yes, these vanity web sites are pretty but don't get carried away with splattering the page with design. Remember that the average web surfer has the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel and if you carpet bomb their visual cortex with too much stuff, no matter how pretty it all may be, if a web surfer doesn't immediately understand what they are looking at, they get confused and turn away.
It sounds quite interesting, a real time bet system. The toughest would be to develop some kind of broadcasting system compatible with games made by different vendors and running on different platforms (i.e. bet on UT, on Halo, on strategy games, sports games...), and there maybe some legal problems with the vendors but if there's money everybody can agree.
SPP is the right way to do that.

The problem comes in that users will look at it and say "What if only 200 of the 400 people donate? Then I wasted my money.."

SPP basically promises that they'll get the money back, if they don't reach the threshold. If only 200 people donate, then I'll refund everyone, and no harm done.

The other alternative is taking "Pledges" and only collecting once you have enough to make it worthwhile, but I recommend against this. The problem is that if it takes a while, people might forget they agreed, or might not come back, etc.

One final alternative is to collect their credit card information and pledge number, but only charge them if you hit the threshold for implementing the feature. There is then a risk they might forget and chargeback, or their card might expire.
I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I understand.

1. You have a working app that people like.

2. You have a set of new features that are being requested by some users.

Seems to me that the obvious solution is to bundle all of these new features, create a "premium account", and charge a monthly fee to those who wish to upgrade.

Voila!
Looking at a couple of the examples and screwing with the text size a bit, everything seems to work fine except extremely big text (which makes any page look bad).
>Grunge-Retro Fonts

I was actually thinking a lot of the examples had an almost steampunk vibe to them. Others remind me of some of the music videos that came out in 2002 - 2005, when emo bands started playing with goth themes. I can't say I'm a fan of the cluttered clip art look or the 'stains' / Rorschach inkblots, but a lot of the other stuff I could really get behind. Reading dense text on bright backgrounds really sucks after a while, and having a few rough edges or variations in texture and colors keeps the eyes awake. I'd even be happy if more sites went to having a slightly darker background in the areas where text is like news.yc does (instead of solid white like Reddit).
http://micropledge.com
Why do startups need all that funding money? It is just for advertising?
Just curious to find out what is the typical pie chart of the spending of a bussiness that requires mostly a laptop.
No. But have I want the ability to, at will, pick out just the right one from among hundreds? Definitely yes.

Imagine you could grep a whole library...
NY Social Networking Meetup Recap - Convos, AceBucks, RadiusIM, Snooth
Well, for people doing it full time try rent and food. Plus servers.
Yeah...but the "geeks are bad with Photoshop" excuse doesn't explain the proliferation of cliche design elements.

For example: it takes more work to generate a glossy bubble button than to not generate a glossy bubble button...but that doesn't seem to stop people from overusing them.
Ask The VC - Should Startups Invest In Patents?
Crikey what is "boolean"? I thought my law books were complicated!
Well, there are two contributors to this. One, there are online tutorials on how to generate glossy bubble buttons, and similar effects (mainly, anything Apple has ever done). And two, now there is a ____ generator for pretty much ever element.
New arrival assists other startups with microloans
I don't think this necessarily applies just to machines. I know that when I am handed a resume the first thing I do is skim over it and preform the analog version of "searching for key words." If I see the words I am looking for, then I may look at the most recent job description and then maybe the summary... I think this is particularly true for technical positions. You want to know that they've got a clue about what they just applied for.

Not that I'll need to look at resumes at my new job (I finally get to write code and not just reports!).
Wasn't superwall made redundant wihtin a few weeks of release thanks to facebook wall and message attachements feature?
This is interesting but not really accurate. If "A trend always appears as the result of the opposition with another." was true, we'd be caught in a loop between one extreme and the next.

It's partially right though. When it comes to "taste" there often seems to be a severe reversal in a short amount of time. I like to think of it as a correction. We're getting to the point now, where the web 2.0 look has reached the extreme. It's time for a correction in "taste". The leading edge of "taste" will snap back to something far from what's currently fashionable (I say far because anything else wouldn't seem fresh) and the rest of us will eventually follow.

Then it will happen all over again.

I think it's partially correct to say a new trend is "opposite" but more accurate to say it's a reaction to how stale the current trend is.

In short, the Web 2.0 will certainly change (isn't that a given anyway?), but I don't know that "grunge" is where we're headed.
The Woz-Jobs pairing.
So follow the current trend and provide tools that make those styles easy to produce.
Ask YC:  I would appreciate feedback on my "Friend News Game" Facebook App (a twist on reddit)
It's sort of like reddit except that you only get points from the ratings your friends give to links that you send them.

So one would expect better personalized recommendations. Moreover, there is an incentive to get your friends to add the app, thus making it potentially viral.

URLs accumulate points from ratings as well and there are global (i.e., non-personalized) hot/top/new rankings.
Personas Are Not Fiction Either
LookOut Search Plug-in for Outlook
A few years back I discovered a great Search plug-in for Outlook called LookOut. It was lightning fast and it not only searched all Outlook folders at once, but it even searched designated folders on my hard drive (e.g., the My Documents folder).
Legal fees are a big one, I'd imagine.
Also paying for artwork, servers, and services to monitor the service for if it fails.. Then there's bandwidth, which is always expensive.
Until Death, or Some Other Sticky Problem, Do Us Part (a co-founder story)
Don't Ask For A Referral If I Say No
You can see the progress on the weblocks trac page: http://trac.common-lisp.net/cl-weblocks/timeline
Folders are unnecessary, and the wrong approach for mail.
Filters + searching provides you with far more usability than folders could.

There are times it is absolutely wrong to listen to your users or clients, especially during a disruptive change like web 1.0->web 2.0.
You know that Amazon has started selling videos and movies for download, right?
Guidelines for Building RESTful Web Services
The web was not crowded "in the beginning" as the author says. Most of the sites I visited used a lot of text with minimal markup and few images. Here's a page I stumbled across that was obviously from the mid-90s (I was searching for the URL in one of the links on this guy's site)

http://www.rett.org/about/oldsites/rettsitev2/pages/links.ht...

Good page design has always been clean and focused. It doesn't have to look like Web 2.0. http://www.homestarrunner.com is clean and focused. But it doesn't look like Web 2.0 at all. Penny-Arcade looks cluttered at first glance, except it's a gaming fansite and the flashy advertisements are part of its style. Once that is considered, the site appears very clean and focused. It's also not typical "Web 2.0" style. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/11/21 "Facebookery")

Avoiding gratuitous decoration is just good design. Feel free to add as much complexity as you can, just don't let it detract from the purpose of the site.
I've moved from prototype to jQuery - I highly recommend it.
I'm not going to get behind any design trend that seem to want to replace more and more text with images of text.
ie: It would have been done over 10 years ago and not called "innovative" by anyone.

(Of course, microsoft bought hotmail, but that's aside the point)
Yes, that are also the usual monthly costs we had. Servers could mostly be ignored in our case (below 20$ per month). Usually some one time costs are also needed. Like some hardware or for us the most expensive thing where the software licenses (though open source got us very, very far). I also paid for some legal advice, but it wasn't really worth it's money.

Oh - and in countries like germany don't forget the health insurance, which is the highest monthly cost I have to pay.
$10 million checks: Accepted here.
What has Jaron Lanier been doing all this time? He seems to be rather quiet...
Good concept. I find myself still sending things directly to other people that I find on digg/reddit/delicious. This has potential.
Where do you get servers for less than $20/month?
I doubt this is as big of an issue as the article makes it seem, either for Google or candidates.
I know the question isn't directed at me, but I found a web host that lets you pay according to how much bandwidth you actually use: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

The bonus is that they support haskell, scheme, common lisp and ocaml web apps :)
i thought one of the big advantages of jQuery was the smaller size of the javascript file(s).

but this demo uses 106k of javascript (and it's not compressed for some reason)

photo from web developer extension:
http://myskitch.com/michelson/document_size_-_http__ennerchi...
Neat, but does this really actually improve web application development (the client side of things)? You still have to deal with HTML and CSS and the DOM.
If there's anything dispensible on Facebook, it's wall posts. Superwall is popular because people mass migrated from the original Wall, and they'll go right back if Facebook makes a clearly superior product (or if it integrates in a way that's impossible for an outside developer).
Microsoft ended up integrating the technology into more recent versions of Outlook, I believe. The indexed search is pretty quick in 2007, at least.
point 1 is rubbish as usual, Look if you can build it then build it and get some investment and hire the talent you need. If there is no co-founder to be found that you don't have a long history with someone that fits the bill then go your own way. If you fall out with a co-founder after working all those long hours then you are screwed.
Conversion tracking will show a drop from 10 percent to .001 percent and the ad will be turned off. Daily budgeting prevents serious loss. Google puts more thought into this sort of thing than reddit and its cute little arrows.
"I have a difficult time seeing the value in an application that can be developed by a first-year computer science student in one weekend."

First of all, the value doesn't come from the technology, the value comes from the users. RockYou's applications have millions upon millions of Facebook users, each of which can generate revenue via... advertising!

Second, that said, I doubt a first year CS student could write a scalable implementation of Super Wall, etc, that would support said millions upon millions of users.

Basically, RockYou is like HotOrNot... not very technologically exciting, but managed to get a critical mass of users. If another company tried to duplicate what HotOrNot or RockYou has done now, they would fail miserably, and believe me, many have tried.
Facebook Users Raise Privacy Complaints
We did only need a vserver for a start which are not hard to get at that price. Also I won't recommend my provider as we had horrible downtimes for a while and it's still not that good. So while we pay less than $20 per month, I wouldn't recommend it and the main reason we stay is that we have a 1 year contract.
really? The features I use the most are 1. pictures 2. wall posts
Yes, c2d. I care only because I hate fans coming on. I like my MBP silent.
I think he's trying to advertise his framework and scala. He doesn't care about the idea.
The base jQuery is very light, perhaps half the size of Prototype if I recall correctly.

The added bloat comes from the effects and UI libraries. The UI library is probably superfluous so that should cut the size significantly.
I'm a little skeptical when their main revenue source is selling users to other facebook applications. Feels like the whole subprime thing to me.
from reddit:
"Excellent discussion on GWT and (versus) Parenscript"
http://metabang.com/unclogit/?p=190
Yes. Not Parenscript as such, but the design style that it fits into can hugely improve web app development. Lisp being Lisp, you can build up natural constructs on the server side for the app you want, then generate your HTML, CSS, and JS from these. Since HTML, CSS, and JS are represented as Lisp expressions, you have the full power of Lisp macros to raise the level of abstraction of your code. Essentially, the browser becomes the target platform of your own compiler and you write your client-side code in a high-level language that is suitable for what you are trying to do.

What are the advantages? Your code is higher-level, so it's clearer and shorter. You get to do most of your work (client- and server-side) in a single powerful environment. JS has become your assembly language, so you can make it low-level and efficient. This is the way out of the tradeoff between abstraction and performance in the browser. (We found that the higher-level JS libraries and frameworks are too slow because they make you pay for all that abstraction at runtime in the browser.) Oh, and it's easy to do code transformations: we wrote a profiler in about 50 lines of Lisp that works much like Firebug's but runs in all browsers.

Another advantage is that you can compile a different version for each browser that you support (no more client-side browser detection). It turns out, though, that browser incompatibilities go way down once you eschew complexity in the browser. Low-level and simple things are much more likely to work the same in different browsers than fancy stuff with CSS or tables.
Agree with e1ven. Our legal costs are pretty high. Suggestion to any entrepreneurs out there, get a expensive lawyer and a cheap lawyer. Only use the expensive one for important things.

About the general pie chart- check out http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/10/financial-model.html. Redfin lays out two years of startups costs.
Why not? I don't see what makes books so much different from the iPod in this sense. Apple's certainly profiting from the content on many iPods...
You read Joel's Strategy Letter VI, didn't you?

This does nothing to abstract away all the nastiness of dealing with browsers. For example, from their introduction, you end up with stuff like this:

(html-stream *standard-output*
(html
(:html
(:head
(css (* :border "1px solid black")
(div.bl0rg :font-family "serif")
(("a:active" "a:hoover") :color "black" :size "200%"))))))
Not all founders have the luxury of living with parents at home. Nor are a majority of founders willing to forgo 100K a year in salaries after having tasted the financial benefits of a steady job. Thats just for the "time" put in by the founders.

Now for directly startup related costs - legal issues, servers (hardware in general), hosting costs...

if you are lucky to be in the next stage, how about employees?
One thing is worth mentioning here: Parenscript is not a CL to JS compiler, but rather a way of embedding JS inside Lisp. You're not writing your PS code in Lisp and you don't have the full power of CL. Over time, people have added more Lisp-like features (for example, keyword parameters), but it's still very much a sexp dialect of JS.

On the surface this seems less cool, but it has advantages that would be hard to achieve with a full Lisp->JS compiler. The generated JS is very efficient. Plus, it's very readable, so you can use all the standard tools for debugging etc. These things are critical for application development, which is why you see full compilers pop up more in the research world and not so much in business.
I saw a Sony reader on the Subway the other day. I had to do a double take -- at a 5ft distance, it looks _exactly_ like paper. I didn't get a chance for a closer look, unfortunately.
Actually another startup patient/kind enough to talk to me (:D) is in a very similar predicament to yours. They are infact building a CMS by aggregating several open source tools (eg word-press and so on). Their main reason for open-sourcing their CMS itself was so the increased scrutiny. However the main concern is how reproducible is your idea? If you are still at the very young stage, and your main strength really is in your IP. But having said that, if your customer base is such that they would be happy to fix problems themselves given the source, that could save you a lot in support-mullah. But that may depend on the kind of license you release your source code under.

What do you folks think? or am I thinking about it the wrong way?
My undrestanding was that redhat was always a service based company, making linux a commodity. Sure it had released its own patches, but on their own, these patches may not hold much value right?
That first page you linked to is from the "export bookmarks" function of (I think?) Netscape 4...
Investors like to invest in whatever it will take you to get to break even, or profitability.

If there is a risk someone will leave over money, or something else, they want to make sure it is covered.

Raising money takes months worth of work and can distract you from your product. Investors want you to do this once, and not every 6 months.

From my understanding even if a professional investor only gives you enough for 6 months, they are expecting to put more in if you are making progress when that 6 month mark comes around. in theory each successive round should get cheaper for the entrepreneur to take investment.
Google doesn't do conversion tracking for you.
while we pay less than $20 per month, I wouldn't recommend it...

Ok, that more or less matches what I thought -- that it's possible to get a VPS for less than $20, but not necessarily a very good idea.
Managing Your Life With GTD, Online Tools and a File Cabinet 
Here is an implementation of the GTD using Google Apps, RememberTheMilk.com, HighRise.com, Jott.com, an inbox and a file cabinet.
Yeah. Some co's have co-founders, others not :) There's casees of both failing and both winning. Personally I've never wanted a co-founder. I prefer to hire people better than me at the things I'm not good at
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=google+conversion+trac...
I think the backpack model is the way to go. Everybody can get free access, but there are some arbitrary limits. Pay $5/mo or year and those limits go away. Also, there's no reason to disturb existing customers. Never never, take anything away that you've given people for free. If you feel your new feature isn't the thing to limit, be sure to roll your existing users into a special $0/month premium account. just ask new people to pay.
Algorithm identifies top 100 blogs for news
Creating My Website (PeriodicTable.com) with Mathematica
There are at least three fallacies here. First, appeal to authority. Second, straw man: nowhere did I claim "to abstract away all the nastiness of dealing with browsers". (I won't repeat what I did claim, since it's just a few lines away.) Third, argument by selective example. What you call "this" isn't representative of what I'm talking about, although it does show what html and css sexps look like.

Still, let's not get into an argument, I'd rather trade thoughts. The idea of abstracting away from the browser entirely seems attractive, but turns out to be impractical once you get to know the problem better. It's like abstracting away the network. So for me it's become clear that there's no way to get away from the browser altogether (except by not building HTML-based apps in the first place). That doesn't mean we can't significantly improve matters by building appropriate abstractions. As I said, we can reduce duplication, increase clarity and efficiency, and so on. The environment I'm describing has provided more of these benefits than anything else I've seen so far.

Re Joel Spolsky, I find most of his stuff tiresome and overblown, but he occasionally comes out with a great idea. What specifically did he say that you find relevant?
If mutations occur at random over the entire genome, how can a complex organ such as an eye evolve?
> Then there's bandwidth, which is always expensive.

It's not. You can get a TB for about $25-30.

Like others said, biggest expense is almost always the salaries for employees.

Legal fees are a one time fee and unless you're doing a VC round, incorporation and all agreements can be had for under $1K. If you are doing a VC round, well, then you can afford the $50K legal bill.
Building TwitterGram into a really big thing!
No Shortcuts to Success for Virtual Entrepreneurs
Interview with Valve Corporation's founder Gabe Newell: game development, business and more
Giant scorpion claw discovered
Ask News.YC about: Secure software updates
Can anyone point to a strategy/known best practice for secure update of a client side program that users have running locally?
Big difference being Apple was providing content for their platform, and Amazon is providing a platform for their content.
I haven't seen where Rails natively supports using different Javascript files in production than in development -- I've always done it myself. Then again, jQuery hasn't been attached to Rails before, so that's understandable too.

Without that being set up, either you run on the minified version of jQuery (a developer-hostile move), or the big old version with all the comments, which is inconvenient for the user. For a 0.1 release, they made the right call putting in the full versions of the Javascript so you have a chance of seeing what's happening if something goes wrong.
Facebook Stealing Googlers At An Alarming Rate
They are going back to Microsoft!
sounds like someone got a hold of this book: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Standards-Creativity-Innovations-S.... It details how to develop websites he's referring to, particularly DirtyPrettyThings.com done by Sam Collision.

A lot of the elements are all pre-Web 2.0. Go to any Border's or B&N and find a web design book printed in 99 and you'll find the very same styles he so loves. The point of this article should have been: "How to determine if you have taste?"