skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Will there really always be room for more successful web startups?
I've heard the argument (also made by PG) that there will always be room for more successful web startups. Do you think it's true?

Sometimes I get the feeling that the internet has gotten too crowded. Every idea I think of, someone else has done.

But it's more than that. I also sometimes think that mainstream users have a finite number of needs that web applications can satisfy. I think of web applications are like kitchen appliances. Once you have the essentials -- a microwave, a fridge, an oven, a toaster, a coffee maker, and a blender -- new appliances you get have decreasing marginal utility. Sure, you can always get new ones for increasingly esoteric needs, but they are just not as useful as the important ones that almost everyone has.

I read about all the new startups on TechCrunch and YC news, and although I think many of them are cool, I don't use 99% of them. Why? Because although they may solve some problem I may or may not have, incorporating them into my life introduces mental overhead. It's like PG's essay about stuff. Having less stuff keeps your head clear. So does using fewer webapps. I'd rather use 5-10 really useful apps than 40-50 marginally useful ones. Although the total utility I can get from the marginally useful apps is greater than zero, this utility doesn't outweigh the disadvantage of having to think about them. They solve some problem, but they also add (virtual) clutter to my life. As a user (which is different from an entrepreneur in the same field) I'd rather not think about them.

Will there really be the next big search engine or the next big social networking site? (By big I mean bigger than the entrenched players.) I'm not convinced. Some industries mature and their barriers to entry become too high. (How many new car companies have been started in the last couple of decades? Not many.) Furthermore, after every adoption of a new product, users have a smaller reason to switch. I don't care if ask.com is sometimes better than Google or if some social networking site is slighly less creepy than Facebook. I still use Facebook and Google. They are wired too deep in my cortex. Trying out a competing product just isn't worth the work.

I'm sure there will always be technology startups. And there will always be new marginally successful webapps that cater to small niches (I just thought of one: a hot-or-not for pets app that runs on the iPhone! Maybe that's my ticket to riches!) But will there always be the next world-changing web startup?

What do you think?
"Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed."

How am I gonna get paid to surf porn :(
Of course, it's your formative years.
yeah, no kidding.

reading it felt like the story left out quite a few details...i'm sure there was a good reason that they slowed down so much--one product with a staff of 50? c'mon...
i forgot to add my favorite comment: "more journalistic sensationalism"

don't let it scare you.
For really simple sites that don't need a full blown database backed CMS I just use simple PHP includes like the following:

<?php
$title = "Whatever";
include("header.php");
include("content.txt"); // or just include the content inline
include("footer.php");
?>

Then header.php is just:

<html>
<head>
<title>My Site - <?php echo $title; ?></title>
<!-- other header stuff like css, scripts, etc -->
</head>
<body>
<div id="content">

and footer.php is just:

</div>
<!-- other footer stuff like Google Analytics, etc -->
</body>
</html>

If you want to get a little fancier you can set up a URL rewriting (like Apache's mod_rewrite) to internally change yoursite.com/section/subsection to yoursite.com/content.php?a=section&b=subection or something, then you can eliminate all the duplicate templates and just have your content files (make sure you validate the section and subsection names). Or you could plug in a really simple database.

I'm no PHP expert, so if anyone has better ways of doing this kind of thing I'd love to hear it.

(actually, I have a question: with this layout it's hard to pass data from included files back up to the templates, like $title above needs to be defined before the header include... is there some trick I'm missing?)
Thats quite the pick up line:

Hello. My name is Clinton E. Curtis, programmer.
Every idea I think of, someone else has done.

Maybe your ideas aren't specific enough.

Take my own not-yet-launched project (http://www.tarsnap.com), for example: Online backups. Lots of people have done those, right? Mozy, Carbonite, iDrive... google can easily find dozens of them.

But that's just the "30 thousand feet" view of what I'm doing. I'm not just doing online backups -- I'm doing secure online backups. Secure in the sense that I can't steal your data. Secure in the sense that the NSA can't steal your data.

Have other companies done online backup? Absolutely. Can anyone else reasonably describe what they're doing as "backups for the truly paranoid"? No -- that's something which nobody else has done.
ThemBid Software Puts Publishers Center Stage in Internet Commerce
Through a partnership with Larstan Publishing, ThemBid is providing publishers with tools to help offset offline losses.
Yeah, I suppose you'd need 1 temporary variable. Your solution doesn't work either, though: doing the freshman XOR trick some arbitrary fixed number of times just reduces to the XOR trick, which is plainly not what the task asked.
That makes much more sense, thank you.
after having trouble integrating Disqus with sansj, I started using http://js-kit.com/comments/?wow and they claim that search engines index the comments on your site.
Online Accounting: The Next Killer App For Google Apps
In high school I wrote a simple web-based voting app for school elections (an election I was running in, no less)... had I wanted to rig the election, it would have been trivial to do so and cover my tracks. As downer articulated, there's absolutely no reason to believe that electronic voting results aren't being manipulated.

Seems like voting might be one of the few areas where more technology is not a good thing.
can anyone find a link for this stuff on the adobe website, I want to read the tech specs and work out if I can get anything out of it. Mainy I am wondering how many connections you can get at the same time from a standard setup.
I'm not afraid of the Copyright Police.
The way I see it, there will always be something that takes us (the users) to the next level. Maybe you have all the racks and detergents, then you discover the dishwasher. Maybe some day we'll get an oven+fridge all in one. It might be hard to think about it but there is definitely room for growth. It might not be growing upwards, it might be sideways, or even abstract it to a different dimension.
I was very disappointed as well when my @!$^^qrx didn't properly &@X!!mfs. And by the way: ^&$%^$#! Unbelieavable, isn't it?
Maybe it meant that A was late, so B decided not to invest?
With respect to "social" websites, I think this fellow has the right analogy - they are like nightclubs.

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-apps-faceb...
Wonder who owns the patents to this kinda technology
Best explanation of the banking crisis I've read
People's wants seem unlimited, at least in the near term. If you accept that, the only limitation on the number of web startups is how many needs can be satisfied by software. (The web is just the current default software platform.) And since everything is turning into software nowadays, it seems likely that the infinite demand for new stuff translates into an infinite demand for new software.
FreeDup: reclaim space on your drive
It does work, you do the 3-step XOR with a[0] and a[last], then a[1] and a[last-1], etc. The 3-step XOR from the OP swaps the data.

Here it is with a 4-element array, a[0] through a[3]:

a=[100,200,300,400]

a[0] ^= a[3]
a[3] ^= a[0]
a[0] ^= a[3]

a[1] ^= a[2]
a[2] ^= a[1]
a[1] ^= a[2]

a
[400, 300, 200, 100]

(Pretend this list is an array, it's just for illustrative purposes)
This is a relatively simple tool that works suprisingly well on my OSX 10.5 laptop. Now if only I could find a good disk defragmenter.
Well, obviously the XOR swap works. But how do you use that to reverse an array of variable size? (i.e. where "last" isn't known at compile-time, so the number of swaps isn't known in advance).
Here's some interesting benchmarking:

http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/2007/12/12/blazebench-why...

compares Ajax/JSON vs. Flex/XML and Flex/BlazeDS speeds of serverside processing, packet size, parsing and rendering.
For the last 100 hundred years there has been a constant introduction of new paper based magazines and newspapers. After the introduction of the web, that has changed and now the web is where most new media is introduced and will continue to be introduced.
I've made my position clear on this ... endeavour elsewhere: http://reddit.com/info/2255i/comments/c226il

I see it's been reduced to a made-for-TV film now.
Microsoft buys Multimap for $50m
That sounds quite cheap to me.
Web applications, including both code and English sentences, have unlimited capability to express knowledge. They have universality.

There is no limit to our use for knowledge. No point at which things could never be improved again. No end to progress.
Word of Mouth vs Key Influencers
I wouldn't worry about doing things that have been done. I would worry about doing it better than what's already been done.
I don't think there is demand for another search engine that is 10% better than Google. Whatever comes along that can challenge Google, isn't going to be a "search engine" in a traditional sense of the word. Because Google mostly works and works pretty well. To displace Google from it's position in the search engine market, one needs to redefine the problem. Or be 10 times better than the leader.

I can think of many ways to make things 10% better, but that's just the next set of features these guys need to implement. I'm not convinced that is a business.

When Google started to work, it was definitely 10 times better than the competition, or had redefined it.
Viewing the web as a kitchen is quite limiting. There are thousands of products in your house...many are for entertainment (TV, DVDs, CDs, ipod, etc.), some are for news and education (TV, radio, magazines, newspaper), some are for communication (phone, mailbox), and on and on...Software and web applications can be involved in all of those things in one way or another.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb if I say that I think changes will come much more rapidly in the future than they have in the past. So, while the telephone has been around for over 100 years, I don't think Skype will last out the next seven years. Facebook will be lucky if it gets five years at the top (if it ever bests MySpace and makes it to the top). I don't think a better "social network" will dethrone Facebook...I think a whole other class of product will take its place (actually a dozen or more classes of products, probably, since people do so many different things with Facebook). Your job, as a technology innovator is to spot those trends and build the products that enable them.

And keep in mind that little web applications aren't the only problem worth solving. There's a lot of software that runs inside the firewall at businesses--and a lot of it is moving to web-based variants. There are many worlds to change, not just the world Facebook is addressing.

That said, there aren't many opportunities to make something as big and world-altering as Google. There's only so many problems on the web that touch every single human being that uses the web (that's a big customer-base). Search is actually the only one I can think of. Email, perhaps.
Niiice! It's a lot like heroku.com, but faster. With a rails like framework for serverside javascript with templates and database support, appjet could be the next big thing for small and medium sized sites.
My favorite part: "An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are."
No more excuses for being late
"Always", no. For the foreseeable future, yes.
We like OpenID and you'll see it show up soon.
Sorry for the trouble - would love to hear about it though: daniel@disqus.com

Btw, search engines access j-kit's comments by indexing the RSS feed. You could probably fiddle with a DNS CNAME to have the RSS appear as if from "your domain."

This is far from a solution.
Always is too big a word. Perhaps in 50 years we will all have plugs into our brains, and we will just KNOW things - we don't have to read stuff anymore, we are just connected to the information. No more need for web applications, so no, I would not say that there will always be web applications, although there might be.

Will there always be new opportunities? Of course. At the moment, there are also still lots of opportunities for web applications.
Comments are not displayed in an iframe.

Search engines do not index included JavaScript properly.
Well it is not easy to penetrate established markets. Even Google will have trouble drawing away traffic from Naver in South Korea. One thing that I am experimenting with is porting popular web-apps in the developed world to the developing world and that has been working well for me so far.
+! for Scooby Doo sarcasm, however comments are not displayed in an iframe.

Posting to our server is.
I thought internships are just cheap labor for the companies. At least in Europe some people do nothing but internships for years, because companies won't hire anybody for real.
This is brilliant. I'm working with a client who wants to get involved with Microsoft Surface. I think I've just found a much better solution, and one that's more versatile!
Bebo strategically inept by cloning facebook platform
Bebo is to get Friendstered?
Ask YC: The best platforms for building virtual worlds
I'm currently putting together a report for a client on virtual world technology. Searching through the noise I've come across a couple that look good (including the obvious Second Life):

http://www.smartfoxserver.com/ - Can create 3D worlds through Flash

http://www.multiverse.net/ - A good development platform but not quite ready yet, I don't think

Does anybody know of any others that might be of use? I've searched long and hard and can't find much that I like.

Also...while I'm at it, does anybody know how many players can realistically be supported in the Source Engine? I know the "maximum" is 32, but is that just a hardwired restriction or can it be revoked?
You've identified a very worthy area to explore that no one to my mind has solved in any definitive way. The problem of letting users get the value of having many apps with the overhead equivalent of using very few. It's a damn hard problem and there's a ton of value in solving it. Have at it!
That seems incorrect to me. Sure the market will find the right price for a programmer, but that doesn't mean the economy as a whole could not be better off with more programmers.

As an example, imagine that Web Development was so difficult that only one programmer on earth could pull it off. Maybe that programmer would get paid millions or even billions, but there sure as hell would not be as many useful web applications around as there are today.
Ruminating on DiSo and the public domain
I tend to agree that while people want a lot of things in the world, we're just not wired to handle, say, interacting with 50 web applications for our needs. I think if you really studied it, people probably have 5-15 web apps they use on a regular basis, with maybe another 5-15 they use now-and-then. That's it.

I don't think this number is due to a lack of web applications to fit people's needs, but limitations of the wetware itself. This implies that there is a biological driver for web application consolidation. It also implies that whatever your app, you're already competing for "web app" time in the user's mind with some other site, even if it is completely unrelated. Futhermore, it implies that great non-consolidated apps actually cause some harm, assuming they take people away from other sites that are providing value to them.

Pure speculation on my part, of course. I just know that while I've seen a boatload of crazy-cool web applications, the number I use is fairly static -- I just shuffle some in and out every now and then.

Great question!
New Jackass Movie To Be Offered Free Online
I'm not much of a hardware hacker but this looks like a pretty small DIY project. A tighter, nicer package might be nice but I think the point is that the ``commercialized" version (cf. Microsoft Surface) is really expensive.
It's over at Adobe Labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/
I think most patents on this technology have expired with the possible exception of multi-touch.
Yeah, at the last place I worked in Italy, my boss brought in a guy who was nice, and a hard worker, but not paid a dime. Stupid boss didn't even buy him lunch on his last day (I did out of a sense of decency). Eventually he hired him on as a 'temporary worker', which is how small firms in Italy get around the rigid labor laws.

Basically, it's just another example of how the rigid labor laws take from some and give to others.
The problem with key influencers is that they can help you get to the top few percent their crowd rather quickly but their requirements and expectations are totally different than those of the rest of your target audience and by leveraging/listening to them too much you hurt the rest of your users.
Your measures in comparison are totally wrong.

Retail products are totally different than software as service which is free. Thus the barrier for the user to try new stuff on the internet is zero comparing to buying something.

Also, the barrier to create automobile technology it's obvious very high and discouraging. However, enough costly innovation is occuring from the existing companies. Hubrid cars are becoming reality.
A model car from sketch to manufacturing to get in the roads is at least a 5 year effort. Compare that to developing an app in 2 months!
Tichy, you mean in contintental Europe - Germany, France etc. The UK is a bit more backwards & terminal about this.
Free Yale Courses Debut Online
This post makes the mistake of assuming that reddit and similar sites actually implement "wisdom of crowds". They don't. They don't because you get to see the 'most popular' answers and choose from those to vote on, if you really wanted WoC to work you'd need to present people random stories to vote on. (This is part of what I attempted to do in my <a href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/wildfire-has-launched.html">Wildfire</a> Facebook application).

He also proposes Bayesian filtering as a suitable technique for presenting the recommended page. Despite that fact that I'm a Bayesian-head (see <a href="http://getpopfile.org/">POPFile</a> for example) I don't think that's a total solution. You can do ML for news (it's an old idea, see the 20 newsgroups test set for example) and I have a private 'reddit' which I use as a feed reader that does ML.

But I think if you want to solve the 'reddit problem' you actually need to give people the chance to control the 'crowd' that they are getting recommendations from. I'd like to see (actually, I am building) an application that's reddit-like, but uses a combination of ML and social aspects to get a better view of interesting stories.

Some of this I wrote about <a href="http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht...">here</a>.
this technically isn't "touch" though, so you should be OK. :)
Not sure whether people's wants - and needs - are unlimited in the short term. In fact they are probably limited by what people themselves perceive is a want or a need, what they know and experience, and their ability to assimilate and absorb new technology. In the long term though...
True, but it all depends on the way the individual claims are written in the patents governing multi-touch systems. If they have separated the claims for determining touch points and for the using different touch points to control zoom for example it might still be a problem, need to read the patent claims carefully to be sure.
Is this a fair analysis? I agree that the marginal value of applications on social network sites is close to zero, but many seem to disagree.
There is not a single comment suggesting that electronic voting machines are acceptable. I take this as a sign that the hacker community is unanimous in condemnation of our disenfranchisement.

Is there anything we can do about it? Or does it take millions of dollars to have any impact in America anymore?
I think that yo have replied yourself, 20 years ago there were not microwave ovens!

On the XIX century people believed that everything has been invented.

Why the net should be different? It is still on a very early stage, we have only seen what it can provide. I think that there is plenty of room for new web startups!
Even commercialized, this could be a cheaper and more versatile version of electronic whiteboards. Just bundle a portable LCD projector and an infrared sensor together and include software so it just works. Get a good team together and apply to Y Combinator.
Live Maps in China: An Interview with Vincent Tao
http://www.opencroquet.org/index.php/Main_Page, though I'd be surprised if it is ready for prime time yet
Brain in a box (or a petri dish)
Check out Max Levchin.
New: Build Facebook Apps on Appjet
Get the kitchen analogy out of your brain. Kitchen needs are different from information needs. What information do people want to get? What information do people want to spread? That universe is a lot bigger than your kitchen.

Any time you encounter pain or desire (yours or somebody else's) that's information-related, you've stumbled upon the opportunity for a web and/or mobile startup. When you meet that need, people's demand for time online will grow to encompass what you've given them.
Doing IS Talking. It's called prototyping.

Almost every good app I've ever worked on started out this way. We always had SOMETHING working while the talking heads were still...talking.

Great article. Wish it had a link entitled, "Email This to Every PHB You Ever Knew"
The brain plug invention would only increase the need for automated information processing.
Open, but not free. "If you'd like to license the Facebook Platform methods or tags for your social site, please contact the Facebook Platform team..."
On a semi-related note, I came across a finance article in the December issue of Men's Health that happened to mention Buxfer.

That should work as some nice PR for them.
Whenever I think this way I remember the story of Newton's students complaining that he'd already discovered everything.
Sometimes when I read old literature that says "by nature" I get the impression that they just mean "deeply ingrained."

When did the nature vs nurture question become a widespread meme? Was it after this book was written?
Yes there will always be room for new applications (web or not) or kitchen appliances for that matter.

Don't make me think about my kitchen! it's awful! I can't seem to keep it clean and the traditional solution to this problem, marriage, has apparently run its course. My girlfriend is a software geek as well and hates to clean the kitchen (and vacuuming) even more than I do. So where is that long promised robot revolution? Bring it on!

And where is that website that lets me auction my food orders, to be delivered by the best bidder? And knowing about the food I eat, the site could also tell me which nutrients I'm supposed to consume more of and which ready meals contain them, excluding the ones I hate.

There are so many old unsolved problems. Anonymous hassle free micropayments for instance...
Maybe they don't think rigged presidential elections make any difference anyway.

Be brutally honest with yourself. If any of the last 10 presidential elections had gone the other way, how would that have changed YOUR life?

Personally, I don't know the answer to that question. But I do know that I have other things I'd rather spend my mental energy on.