skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
transburgh, what is your email address? I have a question for you about Gobig.

Or you can email me if you don't want to post it here.
Get a good domain name, even if you have to pay a hundreds for it.
I think we have one.
Cory Doctorow: Can giving away free electronic books really sell printed books?
With Apologies to Robert Frost
I don't like to quote Bob Parsons, but his essay describing the problem is second to none http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html

It's called domain kiting/parking/squatting, and could be easily stopped if the ICANN introduced a non refundable deposit on a domain name.

The key point from the article is this,

- As it stands, domain names are fully refundable within 4 days. This causes million dollar corporations to buy domains in bulk, renew them every four days, and eventually buy domains that they think are profitable. In the mean time the average web-preneur sees no domains available.
Stupid can have objective qualities as well.

For example, the three company names listed in the link title are stupid because you can't just say the name to someone without having to spell it out for them.
I think you missed the part where he doesn't give a shit.
Microsoft Pondering iPhone Killer?
I was referring more to the article's statements than your comment.
The closer analogy is actually spam filtering -- it's a very similar process (computers processes message content in order to classify it). The computer is processing and storing the data anyways, so there is no impact on privacy (eliminating spam filtering or ads won't improve your privacy in any way).
the internet is definitely allowing independent studios and artists to release movies that would otherwise not make the cut for cinema due to the audience size or advertising budget. on the other hand most people I know still go out to theaters to watch movies (unless the movie is not that great and people will wait for the DVD release). I never got around to watching movies on a video iPod or other mobile devices. I might occasionally watch a movie on my laptop if traveling but for the most part movies look a lot better on a decent TV with good sound.
What iTunes does not reduce are the search costs incurred by a user. If a user isn't planning on purchasing what is on the top ten list, a user has to know what he wants beforehand at iTunes, just like shopping at a Virgin Megastore. So before a purchase is made, a user still has to pay search costs to find what he wants before he makes a purchase.

So as you said, you would go to Pandora or last.fm instead of illegal downloads to find new music and when the new "good" song is discovered, you go to iTunes to purchase it. In this situation, Pandora and last.fm decrease your search costs by presenting what you found to be a "good" song in less time than it would have taken you to find a "good" song on your own. So as long as Pandora and last.fm can reduce your search costs enough so that the value of the "good" song outweighs the cost, then Pandora and last.fm replace the record companies as better agents and you derive more value from your music.

But are Last.fm and Pandora good enough agents for everyone? Or do they really only work as good agents for some people (i.e. better solutions exist)? For example, record companies can and do play a strong hand in determining the results on Last.fm. As long as there are mass-media outlets like the radio and MTV, record companies can influence the "tastes" of mass numbers of people, which influence what music they play and share on file networks, which influence dramatically the scrobbling statistics on Last.fm and the recommendations Last.fm produces with its collaborative filter, skewing results dramatically and consistently toward major label artists: getting results of mainstream artists on Last.fm does not reduce search costs as these artists were easy to find regardless.

It seems to me that the search costs for discovering music on Pandora are also very high, as I have to listen to Pandora like a radio station as opposed to just getting results, and the database is set-up by what musicologists think. Sure the sonic characteristics and structure of a song influence the song, but it doesn't determine whether I will think it is "good". As an extreme example, take two piano sonatas: one is written by Chopin, the other by Tom Dick last week in Ohio. A musicologist at Pandora would classify them the same as they have the same sonic characteristics, arrangement, instrumentation, structure etc. but that does not help me reduce my search costs because I still have to listen to Tom Dick's sonata on their web radio before I get to Chopin.

I think audiences that consume a lot of music could significantly reduce their search costs on a site like oink, because everyone there consumes a lot of music. Because everyone in the community is always on the hunt for the new "good" music (and are technologically savvy), their top ten lists are predictably very relevant to their community, probably much higher than any of them would ever find on Pandora or Last.fm.
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article about naming phones with cryptic numbers earlier. Random strings of vowels in non-words are just as memorable as KR344-a I'd say.

Hmm, maybe I should register kr344-a.com just to be safe though.
Joe Kraus is among my favorite speakers. He's smart, humble, enthusiastic, and funny. Well worth paying attention to. (Not just because he built a multi-billion dollar company.)
I spent 5 minutes or so looking at this. So I may be wrong. But it looks like their primary concern happens to be government making publications available for free online download rather than through journals that cost money. It seems to be that this would be a step in the right direction. I think many people in academia realize that the journal/conference method of publication is broken -- for the following reasons:
-- Turnaround time (esp for journals) is unreasonably long
-- Authors usually dont know who their reviewers are. Comments are anonymous
-- Authors dont have a chance to give a rebuttal. A rejection is final and binding

I think a digg/reddit style of weighted karma would work much better. Weighted = authors with greater influence in the community have greater say in whether or not a paper gets published. Comments can be non anonymous and authors have a chance at rebuttal which means that they have an opportunity to influence opinion and votes as the paper is being reviewed.

The downside of not having such a system in place is painfully obvious to anyone who has spent some time in academia I think. Even prestigious conferences such as ACM SIGCOMM have often been accused of running as cliques.
This makes sense to me for publishers and writers that aren't in the top 25% of books being sold. Marketing for many consumables can be thought of as a two-step diffusion process: Diffusion step 1. Utilize the mass-media to send your product message toward a target audience. Diffusion step 2. Hope that the early adopters and opinion leaders within those audiences tell their friends and exercise their networks of influence so that "word-of-mouth" perpetuates the message first sent by the mass-media.

For many cultural product industries, like publishing, they release many more products then they can afford to buy mass-media advertising campaigns for. For those products without mass-media coverage, it makes a lot of sense to give away free copies of the book. The innovators and early adopters that crave and promote new products have the material they need to jumpstart the second step of the diffusion process (word-of-mouth), and a publisher and writer could see higher sales numbers than they otherwise would have: they still benefit from second stage diffusion without the mass-media costs.

And if there is a concern that the "message would get out" that the book is free online, the publisher could only give away the first 12,000 free online. It seems like putting a cap on free copies could maximize the potential of "word-of-mouth" diffusion and limit the risk of lost sales.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/200...

The original LA Times and Seattle Times article mentioned Xobni and said, "Many names come with little context. Firms such as Xobni, Meebo and Squidoo give no hint of what they might do (e-mail management, instant messaging and online recommendations, respectively)."

What? No hint of what we do? They should have talked to us. It's inbox spelled backwards!
the link for this is not working, most likely a copy and paste issue. the real URL is below

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2007/08/the-c...
very interesting, i wouldn't have guessed that people would have a hard time seeing the number written in big bold letters but it seems to make sense
one program in 1116 variations
i'm thinking of pledging some money for some ycnews features, like keyboard navigation
Thats what startups and small teams and companies are for ;)
You may notice if you look around that much of the time when someone replies to someone else (in any context, not specifically news.yc) they are saying something they wanted to say or like saying, rather than expecting to change someone's mind.

In fact, there are many, many exceptions to my general rule that you'd want to eventually turn over HTML/CSS/design stuff to a designer, and news.yc is one, probably. But the vast majority of my projects are no exception, and I'm fortunate to be married to a designer with strong opinions on the matter, so I get good feedback. :)
i've had this problem trying to recommend things to friends over a lunch conversation. I think part of the reason for the success of sites like facebook and myspace is that they had simple names that one could recommend to their friends.
I love this part

"We give up on this idea, and write the more C-like:

xf->info.nprops=2;
if((xf->info.props=xalloc(xf->info.nprops*sizeof(FontPropRec)))==0)
return BadAlloc;
if((xf->info.isStringProp=xalloc(2))==0) {
xfree(xf->info.props);
return BadAlloc;
}
xf->info.props[0].name=MakeAtom("FONTNAME");
xf->info.props[0].value=MakeAtom("FOO");
xf->info.isStringProp[0]=1;
xf->info.props[1].name=MakeAtom("POINTSIZE");
xf->info.props[1].value=5;
xf->info.isStringProp[1]=0;

Which, of course, means that if we add some code that allocates data earlier on, we have to manually update all the emergency deallocations. Oh, well!

At this point, the reader is advised to consider the initial Lisp code again:

(setf (font-properties xf) '(:fontname "FOO" :pointsize 5))

and notice how much more explicit and simple the C code is."
Is your site provocative enough? (i.e. competing for attention)
Summary:

Be Visual
Be Different--Break Patterns and Expectations
Be Daring
Change Things Regularly
Inspire Curiosity
Pose a Challenge
Be Controversial and Committed
Be Fun
Be Stimulating. Be Exciting. Be Seductive
Help them have Hi-Res Experiences

All good things to remind oneself when developing a product (or at least the homepage/brand).
neat article but most of this has been around for a while. i'm surprised that people are already looking to make money off this by releasing a book
i happened to purchase a one year subscription to business 2.0 to support some university fundraiser. i wonder if I get a refund
this is great news. i've always hoped that after I make some money with some tech startup I'll open up my own restaurant. I must be on the right track :)
And to find good 2.0 domains go here https://www.tdnam.com/trpHome.aspx?t=2

Click on advanced search, include only "Expired Domains" in your search

Here are some domains I found that are available now:

sharedlist.com $10, sharesix.com $10, mybangi.com $5
sharedbutler.com $5, retrobots.com $15, ixango.com $15
newsilicious.com $5, itsnotthenews.com $5, whynotlist.com $5, listandget.com $5, filterlist.com $5, tripslist.com $5, hotwomenlist.com $10, flicklist.com $10

Getting domains this way helps spark my imagination and more "idea rich" I feel in that if nothing else works out I have additional ideas I could work on.
I tend to agree with the views expressed in this article. I can't stand reading books on a computer. Having an online format makes certain things more convenient like quickly looking up something in a reference book (beats flipping pages). Having an online copy of the book (for example with Amazon's search inside this book feature) has allowed me to get a better idea if I really want to buy the book (and in the case of Amazon led me to promptly add the item to my cart).
for all the iphone critics out there I hope Microsoft's iPhone killer will do all the things you are complaining the iPhone doesn't. So far I haven't had luck with Windows Mobile on my phones. The last phone I owned with a MS OS on it needed to be rebooted several times a day.
All UK 'must be on DNA database'
Interview with Celera's Craig Venter
Outsourcing as a Means to Bootstrap
What should be the skill set of the founders for a start-up in the early stages?
What should be the skill set - programming, design, marketing, etc. - for a start-up in the early stages? Put differently, what are the skills that should be present in the founders (and what would be the ideal distribution among them)?
Google licenses AP and other wire content -- and stiffs newspapers
re: inbox spelled backwards, I think to most people it's not exactly the most obvious thing in the world. But anyway, no matter. After all, do the words "Google" and "Yahoo" give any hint about what those guys do?
I think one of the most important thing in the early stages (of a tech startup) is building a prototype to show others what the idea is really about. I think this requires a good mix of programming and design. Most of the time good design is not needed for the initial prototype but that depends on what you're making.

To fully answer your question I'll say that it depends on the way you plan on creating value and what you need to prove your idea. If you have a new idea for a better way for people to interact with the cable TV then design will probably be the most important first step. If you plan to revolutionize a business process by bringing it online then a good understanding of the business and enough programming ability to build a prototype (you're not trying to solve a hard problem here, just create a decent website) is far more important then the design. For example I currently work for a company that has product that looks terrible (by my standards) and yet it's doing great in terms of growth because it solved the right problem.
Japan's Government to Waste $130 Million Fighting Google
Damn, and here I thought Sierra was posting again.

Good post nonetheless.
So yeah, HTML is object code to PG because it can be. Sure, separating programming from web design may be necessary, but it's not better. Having the two concerns properly considered together is better, though more difficult to pull off.
So I got a startup job
Hi. This, my first blog post, explains what I learned in the process of getting a startup job in the Valley. Feedback of all kinds is welcome: from typos and style to things I'm so wrong about.
Microsoft Silverlight 1.0 Launches, Will Support Linux
It's hard to comment in this one i think.
Yes, it's lame to use spacer GIFs as a design standpoint, with all web community try to separate meaningless technique's (tables, spacers,&nbsp; etc...) from documents.

However for this web site, Yes it just doesn't matter.The functionality become more important.There is news link and comment section with a clean interface. Not much black ink.

If you are in this situation, it doesn't matter but with your new startup's i think its better stick with the notion of separating mark-up with design.

I can't keep silent to those anti-css comments but don't know where to start...i think web started as a way of exchanging "documents" between computers. So in basic terms what you see in your screen is "a document" so it should be seen as " a document". without css in html code what you see is...well some kind of hectic ASCII art.

"It is a valuable thing if your page seen as a document"

i sometimes think that, under the supervision of PG, a small design team (designer, info. arch. & UI person) "may" help founded startups to achieve better in their goals.
All feedback welcome
This is an awesome, insightful article. E.g. "Great companies hire great people." I've often thought this myself, but never quite been able to put it into words so effectively.
I wish I had this advice two years ago when I was starting my own company. I didn't pick up my eggs, bread or conquering hero and now I'm a washed up bum.
this is possibly the least coherent blog post i've read this year. maybe even ever.
Sunday's Solutions
In the essay Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas, PG states

"Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas for two or three new startups. The articles are full of descriptions of problems that need to be solved."

This statement gave me an idea for YCnews. What if every Sunday (usually a slow news day) PG posts an article from the Wall Street Journal or any other publication, but instead of people just giving their opinions they gave their solutions to the problems presented in the article? People could then up-vote the solutions they liked the best. This would get everyone's thoughts flowing in the right direction, which is forward towards creation and innovation.
As one of the founders of Wakoopa, I know it's really hard to find a good name for your (internet) company AND be able to buy the corresponding domain name relatively cheap.

As people pointed out above, "Google" and "Yahoo" also didn't describe the service they are offering and also are not really pronounceable without spelling. In the end, it's all about the service the company is offering and we're pretty sure that we're doing okay in this department.

More here: http://blog.wakoopa.com/archives/whats-in-a-name
Titan Rain - how Chinese hackers targeted Whitehall
How fake software scooped 16 awards
(happy-birthday)
With scripting language I had something like jython in mind. It is indeed another code-layer ontop of java to interpret the scripts. And, not unlike python, its dead slow in some cases.

Someone reported about a factor of 100 for java against Ruby. jython is only 50. But this is still so bad that I would not waste my time.
didn't i read some of that in an old JoSoftware article? the "just a big ol' pile of work" bit seems to be how he describes PM using his bugtracker - maybe there's a 4th place that does software development well: Fog Creek.
They might as well buy mutual funds and call it a day.
It Can Be Lonely at the Top
How I Did It: Mike Walrath, Founder, Right Media
It's a good idea, but it doesn't have to be Paul Graham posting the problem. Anyone can do this on any day they want.
5000 Fastest growing US companies by region
Isn't that pretty much what happens with most links anyway?
Business Web 2.0 Demands a Different Trust Fabric Than Social Web 2.0
What We Do, More Than Money, Format & Philosophy
"... Why are we so flexible? Not (just) because we're nice people. We realize that, as it gets cheaper to start a company, the balance of power is shifting from investors to hackers. ..."

"... All venture investors supply some combination of money and help. In our case the money is by far the smaller component. ..."

"... One of the least publicized things we do, for obvious reasons, is mediate disputes between founders. No startup thinks they're going to need that, but most do at some point. ..."

".... We realize that independence is one of the reasons people want to start startups in the first place. And frankly, it's also one of the reasons startups succeed. Investors who try to control the companies they fund often end up destroying them. ..."

A nice read & certainly offering some insights I have not previously read.
Official Digg for iPhone
ProfilePic.com social networking facebook myspace bebo
ProfilePic.com is a social networking teens network, free message girls and guys, create a free profile, safe images, 100% guranteed new friends.

Like myspace, bebo, facebook
Easier to call my researcher in India than browse my Treo
This is a good way of identifying problems, but unless it is for a problem hackers can identify with, we may not be the best people to suggest solutions. Ask the people that are most frustrated with that problem, that need to deal with it most frequently about how important it is, and potential solutions you are thinking about.
The analogy to MS Windows is accurate, and it seems people have forgotten (or are too young to remember?) the downside of writing for a closed platform controlled by one company.

The shift to web applications was supposed to change that (http://paulgraham.com/road.html).
Jeremy Allison wrote something similar last year:

I do worry about how things will be at Google when the money gets tight. And the money always gets tight. I've played the role of Banquo's ghost at enough Silicon Valley startup feasts to know how these stories can end.

(http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/193)
Competing against Google is not necessarily foolish, but doing it under the auspices of a large government program is.
It would be interesting, and possibly profitable, to take the user information provided to you by the bands and figure out which combination of bands would do well in an area if they did a concert together... shrug
A little anti-anti-hype
What Comes After the Information Age?
EXACTLY. That is my general point - Don't be naive!
If this article was intended as an internal memo, then it would be that - an internal memo. If people at YC meet up all the time I'm sure they could have many opportunities to discuss these issues at their "dinners" ... BUT INSTEAD its being pasted on the web.
SO PLEASE, stop the apologetics with this "You need to be qualified for this message". No, you need to be someone on the internet to read this. That is the only qualification. I didn't type a password to get to read this, I don't know Paul, I'm not in YC (and I never "applied").
And as for being smart and flexible ... again. Stroking the egos of young, naive kids who think they have some special predestiny to succeed just because they have good ideas (or not), can put together some code and really, really want it badly.
I got news for you. THIS ... IS ... A ... BUSINESS. You're being encouraged to "step up and endure" not because they like you and want to be your friend. Or because they think you'll make it. They want $$$. Then they'll be your friend. What if your idea never pans out? What happens to those people, because statistics-wise, you're more likely to wind up like them then the next Larry Page. Do they still get invited to YC dinners? Does Paul still call them up on their birthdays? Or are they given the ol' "Thank you, come again (when you have another good idea) ... now please leave?" I don't know. I never read about that. Maybe I'm wrong. But I dont' see a link to "guys who tried, failed for whatever reason, no matter how hard they tried, and are meeting on Wednesdays as a support group to motivate each other until they figure out the next idea while they're working at Starbucks."
Everybody loves you and invites you to dinner when you're making it. When you fail, you're a stupid loser and nobody likes you.
JUST LOOK AT THE CULT-LIKE WORDING of some of these comments ... "this is 'not for everybody' ... it's only for 'smart and flexible' people."
Right. It's not for everyone - just the "chosen". "The few, the proud, the "smart and flexible."
So if you disagree, by implication you're stupid and rigid? How can you not see this black-and-white 2-bit late night infomercial aspect.
"With my system, you too can buy billions of dollars in real-estate with no money down! All you have to do is be very very serious and committed to success! But - this is not for everbody! This is only for "smart and flexible peope. And if you quit your job and risk your career in the next 60 minutes, we'll send you this free pen! Operators are standing by!"
New Version Of Barcode Maker : Great features
New Version Of Barcode Maker : Great features