skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the keyword is "to" offer. I so sick of hearing about this thing already. I just want to try it.

Thanks for the link to the article
I don't mind...except that the invite mail says -
"Please do not share this link with anyone, post reviews, or take screenshots until it is publicly released."

:(
You may come across some seed funding VC's at proto.in ( http://www.proto.in/proto2007se/aboutus.shtml )
That's just cliche. What is intuitive? I'm using a Mac right now. I like it, but I've had endless troubles explaining it to others. It's things like the difference between installed programs and running programs. The difference between task based and object/type based actions. People don't grasp how file systems work. People don't grasp the difference between main memory and harddisk and everything connected to it like saving documents. And don't get me started about networks and login identities...

The desktop metaphor is useless and inconsistent with other things like windows. The desk I'm sitting at physically does NOT have windows cluttering it up! Windows are in the wall, not on my desk. I don't know who had the idea that this is in any way intuitive. My desk also doesn't have programs that are connected in some magic way to my documents. A menu is something I use in a restaurant, not at work or when I watch a movie.

These are not Mac specific problems, but the Mac doesn't solve them either. We need a radically different idea of how a system's complexity scales with its growing capabilities. We need to stop confronting people with that old Von Neumann architeture and we have to stop the attempt to mitigate it with with grotesque inconsistent metaphors.
Another way to think about it: forget about how many people there are in total, I can observe x blue eyes. Let m be the minimum globally known number of people with blue eyes. After the announcement m = 1.

On that day (and any subsequent) if your x < m you know you have blue eyes. If at the end of the day noone leaves, m must be at least m + 1.
I agree. I met Wayne & Robbie at a YC tea (the day after a rehearsal demo, which I heard they rocked), and immediately fell in love with the way Zenter actually leveraged the web to make presentation software BETTER.
Is Matt Brezina gay???
Is matt brezina of xobni and flaming gay
Adam and dave of xobni gay lol
gay xobni *s
I wonder if Europe would be easier in any way. Granted, the economic scene is not like the US, but it might be worth a shot?

My experience in Europe as a non-European says that it probably isn't any easier, but who knows - I was dealing with Italy, which is not really what you're interested in in any case.
The idea that I am working on addresses a need in the Indian market. So it makes sense to find something here. That apart I am not in a position to move to the US.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway :)
Thanks for the link Prakash. As I said before the VCs listed in the above link take the traditional route to investing. In a different context I did get in touch with Band of Angels. But the questions they asked were in the lines of "how much sales do you have?" "What's the current revenue?" etc. Those questions suggest what type of companies/teams they would be willing to back. I am more of a programmer than a person who can answer those questions. I am looking for someone like PG who can look at the demo I have built and see if it makes sense and then back the idea. I am expecting the VC to help me with things like revenue and sales.

If there is nothing like YC, then I guess I'll have to take the hard route of finding a suitable VC or angel.
Maybe 25%.
Sign of the Times? ;)

(sorry, couldn't resist)
In many ways, it's still an issue today: most users (especially for web applications) have come to expect software to be free, but not every business can generate cash from advertising.
As soon as I looked at it again I realized the problem.
NOSO: NO SOcial Networking
A better email client - automatic classification of incoming mail, understanding mailing list headers, reminding me to add attachments if I've said "see attached", understanding bounce messages and tracking them against that address in my contacts list ("You're trying to email <foo>. I see that didn't work last time. Please check the address is correct."). etc.
AMD releases their first open-source ATI driver
Google Announces Adsense For Mobile
> Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

No. Any web store can be in Y! Shopping.
The CEO's Start-up Story of Blackboard
As a college student I found Blackboard to be the crappiest piece of application ever made. Awkward UI and dysfunctional.

These guys need some competition. Each time I find Cramer recommending their stock I can only shrug.
See Microsoft CardSpaces (InfoCard). I don't know if it will catch on but it is very sound technically.
The Ponzi Facebook economy
try if this suits ur needs http://www.nirmalabs.org/,
U will have to leave your day job and attend their college for few months though!
Other existing entrants:

stylemob.com

fashmatch.com

shareyourlook.com
http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/ ?
Quote:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

End Quote

Good for them for paying attention. The growth they'll see next is more visitors coming in through blog posts. Bloggers will be more inclined to cite NYT articles now that the pay wall is gone. They'll still charge for articles 20-75 years old, but most citations will be for articles within the last 20 years.
iPhone UK available to O2 customers starting November 9.
IBM releases free MSFT Office competitor, Lotus Symphony, based on OpenOffice
Anyone else find the "COOL multimedia buzzcloud" on that page deeply uncool?
fashionvictimsanonymous.com (free for the taking)
This may be more of a pipe dream than a viable idea, but I'd like to see someone come up with a new model for an insurance company where everyone's interests are more aligned. For example, a health insurance company that paid doctors a dividend on the long term health of their patients minus costs instead of per procedure. If it worked, doctors and patients would be the ones balancing the effectiveness of treatments vs costs rather than an insurance bureaucracy.

Note that to prevent doctors from working with only healthy patients, they'd be paid out for improvements in health rather than absolute health.
Jef Raskin's Humane Environment (the whole design, zooming UI and all) would be pretty much that.
We have an in house writer, but just put an ad out on craigslist and you should find someone talented enough to write an engaging press release.
HOTorNOT Reverses Course On "Reinventing" -- Back to Paid Accounts
I think I read somewhere that in China doctors's salaries are, or used to be, linked to the healthy days per year of their 'customers'.
The Full Email

--

Dear loyal HOTorNOT star members,

Based on feedback we got from many of you, we have decided to start requiring star memberships on HOTorNOT again. While many of you saw how going free would be good, you also warned us that this would probably lead to more spammers and fake profiles.

You were right, this is exactly what happened. The spammers got aggressive to the point where they were screwing up the system, even causing the "someone wants to meet you" emails to not be sent for periods as long as 5 days.

We don't really regret trying to make the site free so everybody can use it, but it's clear that most of our users believe an inexpensive paid site works better than a free site filled with spammers.

If you left the site after we went free, we hope you'll come back and join again. If you are still here, we hope turning subscriptions back on has a noticable impact for you, helping you meet more people without having your time wasted by the spammers.

thanks, and have fun!

Your friends,
Jim and James :)
These have been floating about in my head for a while. Mostly social web sites but with a twist:

mmmbop: A Hanson based social networking site. Haven't quite worked out how this would work.

pandr: A social networking site for bears.

prson: A social networking site for like-minded people to organise crimes.

Feel free to use them yourself.
A country tune, about lost love, what a rotten woman can do to a man and his faithful dog and truck, deep in the heart of Texas.
Finally they get that their frontpage has been replaced by reddit and digg and Google News. People don't want to buy the album, just singles.
Thirteen Patterns Of Programmer Interviews
Google Blog: Our feature presentation
I think a good answer would be, "Anything that could be possibly scalated to a 'world domination' plan"
Interesting. Sometimes you need charging as a design feature, not just as a business model.
If you could commit to one insurer for life, your interests would be fairly aligned, (assuming insurers care about their reputation and don't want to pull the plug as soon as cost > premium.). Suddenly prevention programs would be worth the costs. The problem is that you couldn't switch if the insurer turned out to be really bad, or started to jack up prices.

By the way, this is basically how health care works in Europe - single payer 'socialist' health care: More cost-conscious, more prevention, everybody covered, less choice, lower quality for those who could afford it.
Facebook backers team up for an offer startups can't refuse
Should There Be A TechCrunch40 Disclosures List?
Measuring performance doesn't work, Joel says: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/oldnews/pages/July2002.html
The elephant in the room with Google is locality. Where are the brick & mortar ads and coupons in g-maps? Will they incorporate GPS location to aid mobile Adsense?

One problem with locality is that your average store front operator knows nothing about the internet. There are probably huge franchise opportunities here.
Hey -- if the money's there, it's a business :)

Seriously. That what makes this exercise a little dubious. It's never version 1.0 of the idea. Sometimes it might be version 23

For example, here's v2.0 of my idea.

Identity Life Insurance. For a fee, either use the internet and/or a physical inspection of people's computers after death to shut down online accounts and notify correspondents that you are deceased (and perhaps what to do about sending flowers, etc) This would give the insured privacy in their final online affairs and also make sure the people you chat with daily know what happened to you. Sales would be to traditional insurance companies (which could offer it as a rider) and funeral homes.

Now does that sound better? The fun of this game isn't necessarily in the idea, it's in the evolution of the idea in response to market forces. Cool stuff!
If you make a better webmail-client, make switching easy! Allow me to give your site a try with my current archive of (gmail) messages and contacts, and keep gmail up-to-date, so I can switch back if I decide (and I'm a pessimist) that your service isn't good enough.
i actually suggested this idea 2 years ago to the devs at delicious monster as a product similar to their delicious library (since their product already supporting lending, isight, cool cataloging, ...)... no bites
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
Oh, why a social music site? Because discovering new (to you) music is a harder problem than playing, organizing or buying music.
I love it. I haven't seen the old Zenter, so I'm not sure what to compare it to. I made and published a presentation, then added a slide. It took a refresh, but this is why online documents are awesome. You can click send and publish the doc, and still edit it.

Too bad a loaded presentation requires a refresh to get the updates. The spreadsheet is really live.

Also, it would be nice to get a web-cam mic input as a presenter.
PG, Any significant difference in selection rates for people with and without demos?
By the way, why I think this would work is that many people care about clothes, people love organising/collecting/classifying, and extremely targeted ads would be almost trivial.
That's not entirely true. Charging is an easy out for handling spam, but lots of companies handle that sort of thing technically. There's one of two things happening here:

1) Hot or Not doesn't have the technical chops to reign in the spam.

2) Hot or Not isn't comfortable with the free dating model anymore, but wants to blame the switch back on something people might have sympathy for.

I actually would bet on the latter, but if it's the former (as they claim), I might be more worried about their future.
Maybe the most important part of the article for would be straight, single, male ycombinators is this:

"I mentioned by way of contrast that I am in the "software business." Now, I love what I do for a living, but really, generally speaking, the occupation does not bring me into contact with a lot of attractive and available young women. It is nothing like, say, being a photographer, a marketing or media exec, a fashion designer, a yoga instructor or a lifeguard. There are probably a hundred other such occupations. Better than all of them must be, "straight male ballet dancer" or running a dance company."

Maybe you should all be starting your own dance company instead of a software start up?
Hollywood Chases Young Men Online
I kind of suspect 2) too.
This is incredible news. Facebook is paying people to be a part of their platform. I thought it was supposed to work the other way around?

edit: At the moment, Facebook seems to be valuable in the same way that Tommy Lee is a celebrity. It's not clear to me how Tommy Lee gained his popularity, and he's not really that interesting in the first place, but he remains popular by continuing to be Tommy Lee. Facebook's using its valuation to raise its valuation even when no actual new value is being created. If the platform were as awesome as everyone believes, Facebook wouldn't need to put their own money/reputation into funding people for it. But maybe I'm missing something.
Oh come off it... I think it's kind of a funny image, PG with a cowboy hat and "gi-tar". Silly thread, silly suggestion. Shooter's answer is sensible.
Doesn't suit me.
Dave Winer on How To Demo
Old post of dave winer on how to demo.
Yes, based on a recent patent application and whats been hinted at, they have plans of incorporating location and time into mobile search results:

http://www.redherring.com/Home/22459

Mobile ads already have higher click through rates than most traditional sites (like > 5% in some cases), so the prospect of incorporating location and time sensitive ads could be huge.
Ask News.YC: Advertising with Revenue Sharing or Free?
My product is a service for other sites to re-use. I'm trying to decide whether I should make it advertising supported with revenue sharing (50/50 split with the webmaster) or make it totally free with no advertising. I can afford to offer it free. My primary goal right now is just to drive adoption. It seems intuitive (to me) that free would further that goal more than including advertising, but I've also realized that offering a new revenue stream for webmasters might be just as (or more) effective.

I'm afraid that letting individual webmasters choose would result in a muddled "brand image", with the people who want a new revenue stream (falsely) believing it's not good for that and the people who want it free believing (falsely) it's not available advertising-free.

I find myself flip-flopping trying to decide which direction to go. Any thoughts or advice?
'Tradeskill' engines don't really reward creativity. With some minor exceptions here and there, they all follow the model of:

(combine X Y Z) -> ItemXYZ, where X, Y, and Z are constants and ItemXYZ is an element in a (relatively small) finite set of predetermined items.

Instead of adventuring to obtain ItemXYZ, you adventure to obtain X, Y, and Z component pieces that you combine to get ItemXYZ, assuming you have enough skill. It feels sort of silly that way. The actual artisan, the guy who combines X, Y, and Z to get ItemXYZ, is not really creative. All he's doing is following a predetermined recipe and applying the skill he got by doing hundreds of mindless combines.

Blizzard's answer to this problem was to shift the focus from item creation to collecting ingredients. They made sure it was fun to gather X, Y, and Z, without just making X, Y, and Z exclusively monster loot. Compared to some other games, WoW's engine was also simpler. Blizzard's solution worked, but only because they sidestepped the core problem.

Tradeskilling appeals to people because it's a creative activity. Players want to be able to feel pride in the stuff they can make. The result is disappointing. Imagination picks up the slack, the novelty wears off after a few hundred clicks, and unless you're addicted to gaining the next level; you aren't going to bother. The way it works now, it winds up only really appealing to people who enjoy organizing things.

From what I've read, Second Life is the opposite. Gamers don't like Second Life, because there's no consistent, professionally-crafted fantasy world to give meaning to anything. It's completely open-ended, allowing for lots of creativity, but what's the point? Obviously plenty of people find a point to SL, I'm just saying this what the typical WoW or EQ or FFXI or DAoC player thinks when they see second life.

I've only heard of two other games with interesting tradeskill engines. I wasn't able to play either of them, so I don't know how similar they are to what I'm going for. One was Horizons, which tanked almost immediately; the other was Star Wars Galaxies, which suffered from being inappropriate for the mainstream Star Wars audience. I say 'suffered' because even though the game was actually doing quite well, it never came near its potential given the franchise name. But whatever the reason, the game was overhauled and the original SWG is no longer available.
When hackers sell out
As do I. James seems like a really cool person, but I feel like he's dishonest sometimes. The flimsy excuses for not sharing the massive profits with employees in the past and this case where they could easily require simple credit card verification to get the same effect. Very weird behavior.
Hedge Funds are the New Software Companies
One of the best thing about the Economist is that they create podcasts for certain articles you can put on your mp3 player. Works great for downtime you never have.
Can Apple subsidize iPhones?
Techcrunch40: Day 1 Recap and My Top Picks
I think it's both Joe Krause and Max Levin that both quote the HP founder that, "You make what you measure"

The problem is that sometimes it's not obvious what you measure, since what you might be interested is something vague like "effectiveness" or "progress". And, like all pattern classification problems, if you pick features that don't give a good signal to noise ratio, your assessment could be way off.

Even worse when that being measured knows what's being measured. A feedback loop, if you will. And thus, the fact that you observed something changes it, which sways the results from if you didn't measure it. Sounds a little bit like photons in physics, but I'm guessing photons work off of different principles.

Joel is merely saying that you should be careful of what you measure, because some metrics (lines of code, hours work) aren't indicative of what you're really trying to figure out (progress, effectiveness).
I would love to see someone creating a RPL programming language, like HP calculators.

I love that language.
Netflix Hiring Practices and Benefits
Netflix offers unlimited vacations, you structure your own compensation packages and more. And they pay (apparently) much higher than industry standards in the Valley.
One thing I've tried to do with new sites, at least, is put small, unobtrusive ads, so that people aren't bothered much, but do get used to the idea of there being ads. Maybe they're so common these days, though, that it's not really necessary. Anyway, the idea is to manage expectations, whatever that may mean for your product.
Hilarious.

Hiring developers for a startup is hard though. Here's a tip for those of you hiring developers for an application developed in PHP:

- Don't hire PHP developers.

The first four months of our startup's life we kept wondering why we got all these lame duck candidates and realized our postings all solicited "PHP Developers" which means every person who still considers "Webmaster" a serious job title.

Furthermore, people who cut their teeth on PHP have cut their teeth on one of the crudest, hackish, amateurish languages under the sun ... And I say this as a manager of a large PHP application.
Is there any free dating site with the 'technical chops' to reign in spam? So far as I can tell, none of them overcome spam directly via technology.

eHarmony - Subscription

Match.com - Subscription

Myspace - Gets spam; though it's less of an issue because it seems like spammers haven't been able to figure out how to emulate a typical real profile, and because many people use the site to connect with people they know already. In other words it's not technology or effort from Myspace, it's that the model is different.

Facebook - Pseudo-dating site, like myspace, plus it has additional restrictions on creating an account.

Any other dating site I've seen has spam all over the place.
OkCupid.com's pretty good about it. Maybe I'm biased.

Also, dating sites aren't the only sites susceptible to spam. Craigslist would probably be a spammer's heaven if they didn't have such great community filtering features.
Yahoo! Acquires Zimbra
Ponoko: personal manufacturing. This makes more sense in the near term than fab@home
My guess: there are X people at a party. If everyone has a unique birthday, Bob gets $Y, else Ina gets $Z.
New Facebook app: lifestream aggregator
intuuch publishes a users activities at various sites ( flickr, youtube, twitter ) as their digital lifestream into your facebook newsfeed.
Try the Seed fund. Erasmic Ventures.

If you are in b'lore ping me via email to chat offline.
Location based creations/addons to social and dating sites.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137254-c,webservices/artic...
A temporary phone forwarding service where you can give a number out freely but say "It will only work for seven days." Same idea as the onetime email address but for phones.
Great interview with Erlang developer: Importance of being Erlang
Design.Yahoo: Web 2.0 meets War Games?
My grandfather can't understand how his DVD player has more than one disc. He just doesn't have any the technical ability nor does he really care about anything but how to get email. I've tried multiple operating systems and instructed him on computer use. He's just from another generation (he's really old), even though he has an engineering degree from Notre Dame.

It would be nice if there was some OS that would boot up and nicely display like 4 or 5 choices to do; flickr, email, internet, news aggregation, and storage. Have the system handle everything else and they could actually enjoy it.
Cinematic Particles
Shekhar Kapur Bets Big on Asia as Global Entertainment Hub
Asian Media (including Bollywood) will rule the entertainment domain ...
When to sell your business, rather than raise more venture $$
though there are funds being created, this is the only industry which is kind of close to new entrant, e.g. any independent artist can only expect thousand miracles to happen to succeed !!!