skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We like Berkeley for what we're doing. The area is very nice, there's activism in the air, there's a lot of good, cheap food, rent is comparatively inexpensive and we can walk right into the libraries that we need to.

The library thing is really key for me, though we're not sure what the situation is elsewhere (Like Stanford, say).
I just tried the Greasemonkey Script on the other forms on news.yc, and it works, too.
Wow. That's something good enough to actually use. I might just do that. It sure beats craigslist.
This is unhelpful on a message board devoted to internet startups (not to mention mysoginistic and probably fake).
Hmmm... this depends on how long you lived in England. I was born in the UK too, but I moved to SF when I was 10 months old. The rest of my family was all born in the US - mom, dad, older sister, younger brother. And I sound like I'm from California, not from England.

I may have a UK passport, but I don't think I'd be allowed to pass off any jokes about England as self-deprecating humor (excuse me - humour).

This reminds me of the convert on Seinfeld who starts making Jewish jokes, but then keeps on making Catholic jokes as well.

Preist: "And this offends you as a Jewish person?"
Seinfeld: "This offends me as a comedian."
...add in a little VoIP and identity authentication and you've got it.

clean up is definitely on our to-do list.

thanks!
Welcome to the third world, Americano!
i'm still checking out amazon, but blinkcart is too, well, blinky for my tastes. i'm not a big fan of the lightbox effect and when the store pops up it's loud.
I thought a color on the web is just a triplet of bytes (RGB)?

OK, just kidding, but I have no idea what you have been talking about...
PG's point about non-Silicon Valley VCs not knowing their stuff as well is a good one, but your point helps bolster the other side of the argument.

New York may be underrated as a startup hub, for the reason you cite. According to Wikipedia, "though it is not often thought of as a 'College Town', there are about 594,000 university students in New York City, the highest number of any city in the United States." Similarly, there's a lot of startup activity in New York, but it's not considered a startup hub because there's so much else going on in the city. Silicon Valley doesn't have anything else going on, so startups and the tech industry dominate its image.
There's a professor at Stanford, Robert Horn, who wrote a book called "Visual Language" which seems interesting.

You can view sample pages here:

http://www.macrovu.com/VLBkExmplPgsMenu.html
rightcart looks like it might work, but it's not apparent how the pricing model is structured. i assume i have to sign up to get that info. (and i'm not paying a buck for a "wink" - whatever that means.)
If it's a mistake to start your startup anywhere but SV, given the choice, then why does YC do its summer program in Boston? This is not rhetoric, but a serious question.
This thread resparked my interest in building a free place to sell and buy domains. I used to frequent Sitepoint's domain marketplace to sell some of my domains or find some good deals, but I hate paying 10 bucks just to list.

I'll be rolling out Version 0.1 tomorrow, and you'll be able to put all of your domains up for free. If you want me to email you with the link when it's live, please email me at:

seantrades@gmail.com

with the subject: Domain Market
I'm actually going to go against everyone else and suggest making it messier. I think with a site like this you actually benefit from having some ridiculous graphics, a la the million dollar homepage. Right now the site is difficult to read, but that's only because there is too much text too close together. The problem with super clean is that it gives the site an empty feel. Throw in a few gifs to give the site a little personality and it makes it feel like there's something going on. You can always clean it up later, like what Amazon and eBay have done recently and MySpace will probably do in the future. Some might argue that eBay should have been cleanly designed from the very beginning, but personally I think the initial garish layout probably helped it to gain traction.

The only trick is you still need a way to convey what the site is about, make it easy to navigate, and display whatever information the user needs to see on any given page.
Ask News.YC: How do you handle email blasts?
We're currently using constant contact, but haven't been all that happy with the features provided. Does anyone have a solution to recommend for blasting 20K+ emails at a time? I built my own for mobmov.org, but I'd prefer to use a pre-built solution if any non-sucky ones exist.
I'm 37. I have set up businesses in London, Houston, Chicago, NYC, Edinburgh and (soon) Sydney. You can hook into a city in just a couple of months, being from elsewhere sometimes helps in creating interest, and the people who will be of most use to you in a start-up are likely to be very open to new people if they've got the skills, drive and charisma needed to succeed. Just my 2c.
THAT is what we like to hear :)
Seed-stage startups are so mobile that it doesn't matter too much where YC itself takes place, so long as they get to demo to investors in the biggest markets.

Also, though SV has the most investors, Boston probably has the highest volume of hackers flowing out of its universities.

Robert is a professor at MIT and is not moving in the immediate future.

But I would want to have one foot in Cambridge even if it weren't for Robert. Cambridge is smarter than SV. The smart world and the startup world are adjacent, but not identical. We'd rather be half in the smart world and half in the startup world than just in the startup world all the time.
While this might not actually be the reasoning, an advantage may be that motion reinforces a mission. Despite working on a web startup I do not have any internet at home -- I use public WiFi. This forces me to use the internet to get stuff done. It keeps me from surfing endlessly -- the occupational disease of every hacker.

Likewise, perhaps it makes sense to use Cambridge for early stage hacking, and SV for finding investors and building a business.
thanks? my sarcasm meter is broken. i have no idea if you are serious.
Eww.

Don't do that.

If you want, make some other, throwaway messy version, host it on a different domain, and prove to yourself that messy is bad.

BBS's had personality. Hacker News has personality. And they're clean. Trying to make a website seem like it has personality by deliberately making it messy is an example of the worst kind of superficiality -- superficiality that lies about it's origin and intent.
I'm completely serious. Unless I'm being completely fooled by randomness, I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of the top ecommerce sites have started out messy and have gradually become more clean AFTER gaining a following. eBay, Amazon, alibaba, yahoo!, epinions, squidoo, etc.
By the way -- you need to separate preferred name from official name, since you use the latter to search authenticate and search public records, but that isn't obvious.
Yes - indeed! It is not the money, but the contacts and the experience of working with passionate, like minded individuals in which you learn from!
Authors start with a blank page, so if there's something there then it's probably there for a reason. It doesn't really make sense to claim that the ecommerce sites of the past were messy "by accident" but that doing the same now would be superficial. The design of Hacker News is great, but I don't think there's one Ultimate Best Design that should be applied to every single app.
Firefox Coming To Your Phone
Ah that's a good catch. Thanks! We should note that the name on your driver's license is preferred. The system can actually disambiguate pretty well (I go by a random name and it asks me clarification right away) but it obviously doesn't work all the time.

We just reset your account so you can try to authenticate again with your official name if you like.
I'm a designer, in my opinion if you want to have all that info displayed in the front page you may try adding a margin to the
.question_list class and maybe changing your font-family in the class .description to Verdana (also you should add more font-families in case the user don't have that font).

I'm just saying that you should let your page breath.
;)
Your right, I should not have posted this on YCnews. I got a kick out of it, but probably would not want to read about it when looking for insight. If I could delete it I would.
Very cool. One small suggestion, and its probably just me being picky. I would advise removing that little graphic on the right of the woman on the phone for the customer support. Everytime I see those I associate it with late 90's web stores. They are way overused..
How exactly is this unhelpful? This woman obviously has not created any value for herself and is now confused as to why no one is finding value in her. I fail to see how this doesn't apply to business, especially startups. If this woman had considered herself as a startup she would spend time building value for herself. She would find one of two things, either someone would be interested in a merger or she would be satisfied to stand on her own. I agree that this is probably fake, and is most certainly a repost of a repost, but it certainly has something important to teach us. Why should we hide behind views that we don't believe in? Do you truly believe that his response to this woman is misogynistic? It sounds pretty straight and truthful to me.
While I don't agree that this news item belongs here, the following is probably the version slightly more suitable for this place:

A Craigslist Posting From An Enterprising Young Founder
http://valleywag.com/tech/superficial/a-craigslist-posting-f...

(source: some time ago in reddit)

(But it is just as much a waste of time)
ha! how could we remove stephanie!? also, our target users have just gotten used to using "late 90's web stores" :)

seriously though, we're trying to figure out how to make people feel comfortable when they come to the site. we ask for a lot of information and are presenting them with a pretty ridiculous proposition. i'm not sure if stephanie gives us more or less credibility, but it does put a human (albeit stock photo) face on there at least. figuring out how to get people comfortable with us and what we do is definitely one of our next big challenges.
I dont know if ku in the middle of your name will count ;)
excellent. very nice application.
Very good point. I was not considering your target demographic, but that makes sense. Getting more users is way more important than small stylistic changes! Good luck.
Thanks for the technical feedback. I'm responsible for implementing the chaotic front page.. sorry. :(

I'm assuming you're suggesting Verdana for the class .description because it's a little more wide than arial at 11px? I've been switching between the two.. but it's pretty apparent now that the page needs some more 'breathing room'.
Where would you put the bullseye in Cambridge? I only ask because we just opened up shop in Kendall Square because that's where I put it, but you might have a better idea.
xkcd is updated 3 times a week on schedule. That there is a new one is not news. (This one is at least sort of about hacking.)

PG posts maybe 2 essays in a month. It is news when a new essay is posted. That goes for many bloggers who only update periodically.
I have always enjoyed reading your essays, Paul. I don't necessarily always agree, but I'm not the one who has made such a success of it :-)

The two claims that "I'm British by birth. And just as Jews are ex officio allowed to tell Jewish jokes, I don't feel like I have to bother being diplomatic with a British audience." are so offensive that I initially thought that you must be joking, but on re-reading, I don't think that you were.

The Jewish claim is just pure racism; the British claim is slightly more subtle, in that it contains a hidden suggestion that IT in the UK is a de-facto joke.

I am not usually terribly sensitive about such things; I'm not Jewish, I am British, and whilst I could write an essay about what is wrong with the UK IT industry today (and not much about what it excels at), I do not concur that the state of the UK is one which (in most circumstances, though not yours, of course, Brother Paul) would necessitate diplomatic skills to discuss.

I am interested to read of your experiences. Ones prejudices are best kept to oneself.
Good luck with your startup!

Try playing with font families, sizes, margins and line heights ;)
Running with Scissors: A Parable
Very cool!

Create an engine that reads and understands the conversation and turns into a regular article or blog post; notating both authors! Also, create a link to the full IMversation.

Call it www.IMversations.com, if available.

Gosh, I would love to get a shot at YC! Hearing ideas like this is inspiring!

If you like my thoughts & are interested in hearing more ... get in touch :)
BREAKING: Y Combinator News is turning into Reddit.
"That sort of negative energy can weigh on anyone, and I knew I had to get to a place where I felt more accepted for this ambition."

Interesting observation. Being in a non-hub, that has also crossed by mind.

OTOH, when you do a start-up, if the negative energy doesn't come from one place, it will surely come from another. So, instead of trying to minimize it, I have had to learn how to better respond to it.

I'm kinda old fashioned, so I believe that the code has to come before the funding. And as a hacker, I don't need a lot of contacts to do that either. So, for now, I don't care what others think or what the atmosphere is where I live. I will hack on.

This is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, condition.
Nobel Prize: Europeans independently found a way to store lots of data in tiny spaces
A Firefox plug-in like FoxMarks, but for your FF plug-ins and not bookmarks. When you download/install a fresh FF copy, instead of installing all your plug-ins, just install the one in which you sign in and boom it starts downloading and installing your favorite plug-ins.
Craigslist folks answers questions about how Craigslist works
My input from the Portugal: http://lists.paradigma.pt/pipermail/tce/2007-October/000128....
CBS eyes gossip site for $10 million
Leaving Google in Search of Act II
lol those are my friends...
I really like the idea, although the number of questions is possibly too long. I think the sweet spot is probably around 20 questions. shrug
Apple Stores are the new Starbucks
I hated constant contact, we switched to http://www.campaignmonitor.com and have been much happier.

Also heard http://www.stun1.com is supposed to be good, but I don't have personal experience with them.
I think you could use a self-organizing map (SOM), too.

Frikkin' awesome idea, anyway. We're at the /beginning/ of what we can do when information and its processing is ubiquitous.
It's the Crystal Tower Apartments - Lombard and Taylor I think.
I'd recommend Emeryville or (parts of) Oakland. It's well-priced, right across the Bay from SF (<10min BART ride and you're downtown), easy access to the major freeways.
> There will be more extraordinary programmers in the MIT CS program, but they will still be there at Podunk State University, and if you're careful and aim high, you'll have a real shot at getting those people onboard.

I don't think this is the case. I went to another Canadian university (Queen's), and in my opinion there were perhaps 2 or 3 first-rate programmers in the entire undergraduate program. I'd expect there to be 10x or more that number in a typical Waterloo class. Depressing, perhaps, but true in my experience. There's a strong clustering effect: the best programmers want to be wherever the other best programmers are.

It's interesting that a similar effect doesn't apply in theoretical physics...
What an incredible life! makes me feel spoiled for being born in Soviet Russia.
This morning I recieved a phone call soliciting me to use there outsourced services. She had a full on Indian accent and everything.

I suppose I should have asked her why should I outsource to India when I can outsource programming to China for half the rate but I was too suprised and just told her thanks but no thanks.
I know some people were asking of other cities.

I have folks over here in Portland that I visit, usually I'm in LA or SV sometimes. It's a dramatic shock the types of friends you make, even if you try.

For example, if you're in Portland and try coder or Linux groups, the forums are dead a lot, the Meetup groups are the same way. Ask around successful people about who they know. Your network will be limited.

It all adds up in differences.....

The advantage is that you can get the feel of people who aren't bent on startup -> domination, which is probably the majority of your customers.

Think of it like the art of personal maturing by living for a few years in a different country. Gives you major perspective and altitude.
You didn't mention Redwood City. This is where I moved to four months ago, and I love it. The downtown is small, but beautiful with many restaurants most of them have outside seating because the weather is so nice. Actually, Redwood City uses the slogan "Climate best by government test". And I would agree; we got only 3 cloudy days in the last 4 months. It's not too hot and not too cold. And, it's not as expensive as other places. As for location, it's close to the 101, and it's half-way between San Francisco and Sunnyvale, so you're not too far for any event in the city or the valley.
What's your opinion about basing your start-up where the bulk of your customers are? For example, if you're gearing your product for use by the public sector, shouldn't you be based in the Virginia technology hub that supports Washington DC?
Nice, make it a Weebspace
La Dolce Startup - Or, how one founder inspired and integrated a non-techie onto his team
In essence: You can't win the lottery if you don't play.
Oakland is many many things. It's a big city with tons of different neighborhoods - it's basically impossible to generalize.

ps. while the berkeley bowl is somewhat expensive, it has the best damn produce section on the planet. Period.
In my mind I kind of lumped Redwood City, and that whole Atherton area, in with Palo Alto. Redwood City indeed is a very nice place, there's decent housing, a friend of mine whose parents are pastors were able to buy a house with a pool, and there's this atmosphere around that particular area that's just unique. I think it's a combination of expensive cars, luxury housing, and smart people that makes me want to do better.

East Menlo Park is kind of ghetto though.
Don't discount Fremont/Union City (Maybe even Hayward) - its central; crime is low @ least in Fremont; and Hayward is making a great effort to revamp their downtown. UC is bland - but convinient.
I digg!
I was interviewed on a nationally syndicated radio show about my product and barely saw a blip in traffic...

I'd say it totally depends on your audience/product. There are plenty of people outside of our Web 2.0 echo chamber who pay a lot more attention to old media than new media.

Profile your buyers/users, understand where they spend their time, and make sure that you've got good visibility there.
Perhaps the trend reflects the fact that they finally worked out which one is actually better.
dugg
This one was especially funny for me since I was just part of a company that wrote student information systems -- the software that is used to track student records in K-12 schools. Fortunately, we were using prepared statements :)
i think the idea is more funny than self-helpy. i know scores of women who'd subscribe, if only to banish ex-boyfriends from their inboxes (temporarily).
scottmcnealy.com

groovetip.com
I settled on Mountain View, and have been happy with the choice. The downtown, despite aspersions on its character by alaskamiller, is actually quite nice. More Asian food than you can shake a stick at (some of it very good), a couple of great little Asian markets (I just got back from one of them, where I bought everything I needed for a good vegetable soup, some Jasmine green tea, and some nice looking apples for cheap). Having shopping, and especially restaurants, within easy walking distance is now my primary concern in choosing where to live.

I'm renting a house a few blocks from Castro St., and I like the whole town quite a lot. It's not San Francisco, and right now, that's probably good--I would go to rock shows three or four times a week if I could walk to the club. I've got work to do right now, and don't need the distraction. Presumably, if you're starting up, you also have work to do.

That said, being around other startups has value, too. The YC guys often get together in the city, and I'd love to go, but I rarely have a car handy (and I hate driving/parking in the city, anyway). If I lived nearby, I'd walk, or catch a bus. But taking the train (which stops running at a ridiculously early hour) from here to there isn't an option. Once things are spinning nicely, I'll probably move to the city, or possibly back to Austin.
did you see peter norvig at the SF singularity summit last month? he discussed predictions from an early 1900s ladies home journal article. there seemed to be no pattern in what sorts of things came true.
People always think I'm saying "virtualmen.com"...Quite different, but possibly also valid, business model.
Thats always the way. Degrees can hold doors open for you, for a while, but not much else. I would expect its more the contacts you make etc.
i'm told it's a buffalo. but a super smart one.
I like getretarded.net
It's kind of suspect that the top story on the women side was about the dallas cowboys.
Speaking of visual math, Knot Theory is cool:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_Theory
The buyers info always starts with something like "We would like to speak..."

I wondered if there was some default text in the set process buyers go through when they create a listing. Perhaps default text that started with "We would like to speak...".

Because all the blurbs start out like that, I found it hard to skim over the list (hence the blurry comment).

This may not be your problem, it may just be that all your buyers are just copying each other. Does that explain my comment any better?
No, but you also need to have a very clear design which transmits a mental model of how your site operates. I'd be skeptical of a site that was messy and over cluttered especially if I was going to be using it to trade knowledge!

I think a clinical, empty look wouldn't do, but adding more mess is the wrong direction.
Ah yes, that does clarify things. We've helped our buyers write their first listings, so that's probably why they look similar. The steps that buyers go through prompt them for specific data points that help them create complete listings, but the description you are referring to is just a text field. It's interesting that you were scanning those - I just did as well and the similarity of the text jumped out at me too. Thanks for the feedback!
Very nice. I would just love to see it generalized. An open way for any social site to use Weebly as their profile editor.
Jim Buckmaster is a legend.