skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Since Google makes a point of marking the link as "sponsored" and having a different background color I doubt most users click on it thinking it's a search result.

On the other hand I have witnessed with my parents that they don't differentiate between the URL bar and the google search box and most often type the URLs directly into Google. But I've never seen them click on an add as a result of this.
"The world just got unbundled. Like it or not, there you are."

The world has been unbundled for some time. Some largish media companies have a history of making a stink about this in the form of trying to stop what they mistakenly called "deep linking". As if the Web were not, you know, a web, but rather a nice linear set of defined paths and pages.

Godin's advice isn't wrong or bad, but it's something that information architects have been pointing out for some time now; you cannot assume how a user reaches any give page.
Theories about Google's acquisition of Jaiku
I think you need to distinguish between a niche social network and a niche community. Social networking is effectively a specific bundle of features (profiles, friend/ buddy-lists) but there are a raft of social features that can be deployed as part of a community that may be more effective. For example, whilst a social network for sports fans might not work, some kind of wiki/ digg combination might be killer.
dude, he was joking.
This problem would be solved if the recommendations, based on what you upmodded/downmodded in the past, actually worked (in reddit they never did). The book recommendations on amazon are often quite good, so it seems like this should be doable.
It's on topic. It's funny. I don't see the problem here...
In this corner: Facebook is a pre-IPO tech company with a hacker at the helm and Silicon Valley's finest backing him up.

And in this corner: MySpace has slick executives and a horde of Windows developers who are stuck in LA.

Let's get ready to rumble.
That was part of the intention yes.
Events where I don't know anyone are usually horribly awkward. But what the hell -- that's what the open bar's for! See you all there.
I meant that sending my log data to Google would require bandwidth to upload those logs. Using the javascript method requires bandwidth from Google and users, but not me as a site owner. Either way its not a big concern unless it's done in real-time.

Lots of requests to a site are not page loads that include Javascript. All static content requests, API calls, and anything called remotely is missed by GA.

More than just robots don't support Javascript. Many of mobile devices don't. The Javascript method is also inherently inaccurate. It relies on browsers doing something on each page, and that something doesn't always happen.

I think what they have is great, but it's not a complete analytics solution. I still have to analyze my log data because GA misses out on some very basic stuff. If someone wrote a competitor to GA and accepted my log data, so it was comprehensive and super accurate I would switch immediately.
But we'll be wearing nametags! With our usernames on them!!

We all know each other on the Internet ;)

Besides, there'll be lots of beer. Problem solved.
I bought the book because Tom Byers is great, although I haven't read it cover to cover.

As much as it's possible to reduce entrepreneurship to 'theory', this book does a good job of it. It's good to be able to structure your thinking about strategy and marketing and operations etc, although I think in reality most entrepreneurs are so busy trying to execute that strategies are pretty quickly thrown out the window :)

Check it out in the library or bookstore before you buy it. An alternative is New Venture Creation by Timmons and Spinelli, which I quite like.
Skype co-founder Agrees Skype was Overpriced
Is it legal to scrape from other news sites? Wouldn't that scare off acquirers?

I would start a new reddit, scraping unofficially at first until the bird can fly on its own, and then dropping it.
yep. i'm here because this site has the same feel as reddit did in the beginning, which is now more or less useless for me, sadly.
Will the RIAA Win? - Legal Overview of $222,000 Appeal
I think we don't need just another social network. Do you know about identity crash problem (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=identity+cras...)?

We need some bridge between websites and social networks. some kind of cross-site copy-paste technology.
WOW! That's a great idea! Multi-charge batteries, light weight, opensource, reliability, low cost. I imagine a boy from Tanzania sitting with this laptop among the trees and creating something new, cool. Something US and EU people couldn't imagine.

And the wireless mesh connection feature is astonishing too!
The "I'm feeling lucky" button is far more useful than it first appears, I find it invaluable (well, the backend function that supports the button, at least)

I use it to quickly get to the [usually] most relevant Wikipedia page using the custom search bars in Safari (via Inquisitor) and Firefox: http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=3
When seed funding is better than Series A...
I recently suggested a debating platform on Cambrian House: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/idea/idea-promoter/ideas-id/auw...
Here's something I thought of today whilst reading the gripes of reddit: their main issue can't be the community, but instead the amount of power they give individuals within the community.

Reddit could look to Wikipedia of all places and come up with some ways to give individuals within their community more clout over the stuff that hits the top few pages.
> Evolution is an observed fact [...]

Has it been 'observed' for a few years or for millions of years ;)

Again, it can't be observed for a period that would be sufficiently long to really prove for evidence.

Hence it's still a theory, sorry.

(Most 'scientists' need to learn philosophy, especially the greek one. It would help very much to understand logic, and to understand terms like 'theory'.)
For me, the biggest similarity between now and the late 1990s is the impending sense of economic slowdown, e.g. http://seekingalpha.com/article/49434-economists-reduce-2008...

I remember at the end of 2000 (I was working for an i-bank at the time) everyone was talking about the "possibility of recession next year".
No it's just a trend. Along with e-this, i-that and trying to fit @ into your companies name to make it sound technical.

Plus the lack of short urls these days.
I saw that comment from Cmdrtaco the other day and thought that it was a real good summary of several "news" aggregator sites.

My slashdot user # is like 32000-something. It would have been lower, but I lurked for a year before actually signing up. Then when digg and reddit came around I sort of abandoned /., the news on these new sites was NOW, and it was voted on by The People, not decided by The Editors.

And then a couple of funny pics made the top stories, and that was a nice break from just news. And then another funny pic, and then one I had just seen the other day, and then one from 1985, and then...

I think the algorithms behind Digg and reddit, or the stories being promoted, show that as a whole society is pretty basic and easily entertained. Hackers, BizDev folks, Founders - we are the minority out there.

When these progressive, techy, news-aggregator sites first emerged, they held "our" news, because "we" ran them. Then, they were diluted as more (I'll call them "normal") people globbed on to the concept.

Soon, LOLCat pictures and videos of stupid stunts out rank a security flaw in FF, or news of a software project being acquired.

This is where I think /. has the edge again, geeky-hacky-founder-types select the stories and weed out the LOLCat pics from the submissions. It's not perfect, but it's good for now. Combine that with Hacker News, and some other "underground" news sites, and I guess we come to the conclusion that just as "we" stay on the leading edge of technology, "we" will have to stay on the leading edge of news sites as well.
This article made it to the front page purely on the basis of its content, not title.

I am new to Hacker News and this disturbs me: I have to click the link before I decide to vote on it?

Please. If I want to be a thoughtful human being, I will open a book. The internet is for mindless titillation.
news.YC has the threads feature which does a similar thing
Mozilla and Mobile
VentureBeat points to VC firm reviews
Revyr: Rating workplaces
I don't know, http://programming.reddit.com is lightyears better than http://developers.slashdot.org

I would rather dig through (no pun intended) fifty articles a day for five good ones, than have one mediocre article per week based on what they think is interesting.
We did once try introducing a group with good programmers and a bad idea to one with a good idea and no programmers in the hope they'd merge. They didn't, and in retrospect it was stupid even to try. The people are the foundation of a startup.
Internet names for Asia launched
Ask 37signals: Is it really the number of features that matter?
Well ok thats seems reasonable :) ... shit ... :(
Doesn't Digg do this, or is it just the fact that high ranking Digg people have more followers who want to "help out"?

Giving people more power makes it break much quicker. You'll soon see upvotes being sold, etc, etc, etc.
I have this great idea for a dating site ...
Peter Xu: Are you ready for XOP (XML-Oriented Programming)?
Online GUID Generator
Great story. I hope you continue to develop this idea, even without YC.
Micro-blogging is taking off
Idea: anonymous salary data
Set up a simple web site where people can enter their job title, location and salary. Totally anonymous plus all data from the survey is made public. To get salary data you'd have to give your own salary information.

Why is salary data so hard to find?
Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube
Spam attack software: identify the toll-free telephone numbers in spam emails and automatically call multiple times using Jajah (or similar VoIP service).

Unlike spam (which costs little to send), the spammers or their clients have to pay for all those telephone calls.
So we celebrate today or in Feb 7?
How would this be different than salary.com?
The Future According to Sun
Maybe to make it simpler and global - not just US.
Want to be bought by Google? Add "ku" to your company name
Salary.com does not return results for a lot of queries for one.
Blog: IT salaries hit the ceiling :
(this is for New Zealand)

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objec...
What problem are you trying to solve? What is the need for "a lot of queries"?

Just curious. This seems like a good(ish) idea, but also one that is not as easy as it sounds. There are no ISO standards for titles, so something like "VP of Business Development" can mean wildly different things from person to person, or company to company.

You would have to (IMO) do a lot to standardize the input options and verify the data to make it really useful.
Google Enterprise Search gets social
27 Hospital Workers Suspended for Security Violation
How did they get caught?

If every viewing of data in the app is stamped, didn't the users realize what would happen?
How did they get caught?

And if every viewing of data in the app is stamped, then didn't they realize what would happen?
For Reddit devs : make something about "submitting too fast"
I understand that it's suppose to be an anti-flood system, but you have to do something about it because there are users who want to submit a couple of subj. one after another - if "you're submitting too fast. try resubmitting again in a little while." msg. comes why they want to submit they might not come back again to resubmit after the waiting time is over. That's because they've already moved-on from the subject or lost interest in submiting it, or just have a short attention-span. I suggest something like a queue maybe, to at least not lose the subject with the "submit too fast" msg. Is there something done about this in the rewrite I've heard about ?
Social Networks and ADD
Scott Guthrie announces ASP.NET MVC framework at Alt.Net Conf
I would have never guessed that this is a problem. I have a problem with reading hacker.news and other websites too much, and have resorted to editing my etc/hosts file to route those URLs to localhost

you'd want a hosts file for emails? interesting.
This case is just perverted. Here in France I can go to the public library and check out any CD I want for two weeks. So look how easy it is to get music I never paid for. This case illustrates the danger of using apps such as Kazaa (or Limewire or eMule...). People should use private peer to peer apps, which are 100% legal, such as GigaTribe: http://www.gigatribe.com
Word count Greasemonkey script for YC application (beta)
I'm going to guess it's also an anti-spam mechanism. One of the easier ways to detect spam bots is the rate at which they submit. My only other guess is that it could also be a social mechanism, where it forces users to submit higher quality articles. If a user lost interest and won't come back and submit, then it probably wasn't worth submitting.
I'd question the accuracy of data gathered that way: people inflate how much they make.

Allowing people to submit that information anonymously only compounds the problem.
I have no demo for my application, so to at least provide something, I started working on this word count script (also I could not find another script that worked).

Unfortunately I could not yet find a way to get the text from a textarea after the user has edited it. I would welcome suggestions. In the meantime you have to press "update" on the application and open it again to see the new word count.

Note that it is my first Greasemonkey script, I am not a Javascript whiz, and I was pressed for time, with accoring effects on the code quality...
Techmeme's juicelessness
On those rare occasions when one of my posts claws its way up the list at Digg, Stumbleupon, or Reddit, many thousands of visits result. Even some recent headlines modestly positioned on the Y Combinator news feed have generated more traffic than a prominent Techmeme headline will.

So what gives?
Tech's Big Ideas Start Smaller
Silicon Valley is booming again, reminiscent of a decade ago, when precocious young minds hatched entrepreneurial ideas (sometimes admittedly half-baked) that incorporated the Internet in some way, any way, and turned themselves into paper millionaires.
With all due respect, WTF?!? You maintain that people are the foundation. Seems like in this case the people were not up to it. Either the "idea guys" had an idea which was not compelling enough to motivate the programmers to overcome their personal conflicts, or the "programmer guys" were acting like a bunch of immature, childish, egotistical amateurs and let their personal opinions and the emotional sparks inherent in any high-pressure environment cloud their professional judgement.

Honestly even if your name was David Heinemeier Hansson and you were in my startup and I found you sitting on your rear end and doing nothing because you had a personal conflict with somebody in the company ... well maybe if you were David I'd toss the other guy out. But anything short of that I'd have to have a serious pow-wow with both sides and lay the smack-down; too much money at stake these days and too much much-needed world changing to let shyness and immaturity get in the way.

So it seems like the idea was not THAT great, or the programmers not too mature, or the leadership completely lacking the ability to establish a vision strong enough and roadmap clear enough to get people to redirect their focus from the obstacles to the opportunity at hand.

So idea guys, programmers, lack of leadership - clearly all "people problems" .... how then do you make the leap in logic that the general idea itself was "stupid even to try."

That's like saying, "Should architects get together with masons to figure out how to build houses more efficiently? Well, we tried that once and the foreman and the architect got into an arguement, so it was stupid even to try."

No, it wasn't stupid to try. The outcome was stupid and that was because the trial components were stupid. Doesn't mean the experiment design was stupid.

On the other hand, what is the implication of your argument, that only programmers can have ideas worth executing and that the rest of the world just sits on its collective rear end and wait until some programmer somewhere thinks up solutions to all the world's ills?

I think not.
Starting salaries surge for computer science grads
Startup idea: create a new browser rendering engine
500 Days at the Helm: The Rise and Fall of Gil Amelio
I usually defend XML when people say it sucks, but in this case I'll step aside.
I wonder how much companies could benefit from a human oracle. The way HackerNews gives weight to votes is interesting and relevant.

First, a human marks certain users as very legit. There need only be one marker. Next, the users those marked users mod-up in the normal course of the site are added to a white-list of users that can submit at any rate.

This wouldn't be hard, would be completely opaque to the users, and would avoid annoying messages thrown at your most active real users.

There are many, many problems with reddit.
Hey antimattar; might I enquire as to your professional identity, if not personal than firm? I just assume when you say, "if you were my client" ...
Maybe philosophy could be also used as psychotherapy.
It's funny, but sometimes Paul himself tries to push words too far:)
I tried to "hack" reddit a few days ago and got the message, even though I had only submitted one article!

By hack, I mean that I wanted my article to appear on both "business" and the root. Well for some reason once you choose "business" you can't get that checkbox that says "submit also to reddit" to be active. Although it seems to work with "programming". So I chose programming, checked the box, then re-selected the business topic. The little checkbox stayed checked, although it was dimmed. When I hit the submit button, it gives me that "submitting too fast" message.

Took about an hour to figure out that the "too fast" message must be some kind of fall-through case. Once I did not "hack" the UI, the submission went through okay. I still don't know if the UI was broken or working correctly, but the error message sure could use some improvement. (as well as the UI, imo)
Not really. There are articles worth submitting but because of user psychology and behavior it will not be posted. My logic is that the user will think: "Well, if you didn't want it when I was ready to give it to you, why bother to return and re-submit it". The software should come in the aid of the user, not the other way around. Of course, you might also take into consideration statistical behavior and think: "If a user will not submit it, then other user will come and do it" but that's really relaying on chance, and not a good plan to bet on it.
Do you know if reddit has this system where if you have more "karma" you can subbit articles more often ?
Offshoring Is Dead: How to Thrive in the New World Order
You're right as far as perception, but it is immobile. Mobile robots are to immobile robots as animals are to plants.

Any wagers on where the first shot fired from an armed unmanned ground vehicle? N.Korea DMZ, Iraq, ... Iran?
I have no idea. That would also make sense.
CoMP

Collective Music Patronage

A website that allows listeners to make donations to support musicians. Donations can be directed to specific bands/artists, or to a collective fund, which is allocated to bands/artists based on downloads of free music directed through the site. (The site is a bittorrent tracker.)

The website also promotes communities of music fans, allowing them to suggest new bands/artists to each other, trade news, schedule meet-ups, etc. In theory, the forums could also allow artists to interact with their fans.

The middle-man in music, the record companies, are a Dead Man Walking. CoMP wold be the new, almost invisible, interface between artists and consumers.
Living on Loyalty, Trust and Big Ideas
There are plenty of reasons to work at a startup. But what those reasons fail to address are some of the core principles that drive startup success.
"Honestly even if your name was David Heinemeier Hansson and you were in my startup and I found you sitting on your rear end and doing nothing because you had a personal conflict with somebody in the company ... well maybe if you were David I'd toss the other guy out."

That's what they did, it's just that they "tossed the other guy out" by not getting together in the first place. That's much less messy than a nasty breakup/firing later on.

Personality conflicts are not something you can work around by force of will. Maybe if all parties are disciplined, you can make the situation tolerable. But in a startup, it has to be more than tolerable. If you don't like the people you're working with, you're not going to be doing your best work.
The Future of Firefox and JavaScript
http://salaryscout.com/
I think people are right to distinguish between the apparent Web 2.0 social software fashion and a true financial bubble. Anyway, at least I finally know what bubble sort is good for. Getting them bubbles sorted ;-)
Well instead of job titles, have it based on other parameters. Example: Degree, College graduated from, years in field, field, area

Then you can do all sorts of fancy stuff (income vs. location; true after-tax income; ratio of income vs. COLA)

Then you could monetize it quickly by linking to off-site job postings, creating your own job board, offering banking opportunities.

yep, gonna file that one away in my idea book.
I'm pretty sure PG's implication was that merging people who were not already close and simply expecting them to mesh was a bad idea, not that one group was hackers and the other was not.

I think too many people underestimate the importance of a strong prior relationship with your co-founders. I would like to see an example of a successful startup where the founders did not know each other very well prior to starting the company.
Yeah after I posted this I got to searching around and found the post that said the 6 month mark was August 20th... So I guess the go-public birthday is probably more like February 20th.