skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition
halfbakery.com
I'd like to see a web service and plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird to synchronize message filters, junk settings, mail box settings etc. among different Thunderbird instances (running on different computers or on different OSes) - similar to foxmarks for Firefox bookmarks.
Fun hobby of the week: Twitter-tracking dirty words
Csikszentmihalyi: "Time is more flexible than most of us think"
Tinchilla - Instant Can Cooler (from room temperature to cold in 60 secs)
Get this off of ycombinator - it's news for startups and hacking, not gewgaws. Try gadgets.reddit.com
I am using another Asia Payment Gateway comapny called <A href="http://www.paymentasia.com">PaymentAsia </A> and they have the 3D secure with Visa/ MasterCard. Is it good or not?
Hey, good idea, are they not super-techy there, like they even pay for parking slots through their mobile phones?
I didn't know about TB-QuickMove, but have wanted that capability forever. Thanks!
It's more sound to say to the public that those desperately seeking, and/or producing, voyeur porn on public lifecasting services shall be shunned than taking a stand with investors and the family lobby that voyeur porn should/can be produced, and consumed, by the whole public, freely.

Perhaps I don't understand what you mean by "sound".
at least one of these things is no longer good practice. Engines, for example, are deprecated
if you spend less than 10 minutes worrying about your diet, you'll end up eating twinkies and mcdonalds most of the time. it's not trivial to find good produce and vegetables in america.
also, one of the article's main points is that meat is not good for you in large quantities, but it's ok in relatively small quantities (much smaller than what the typical American consumes).
I'd love to see someone create a virtual lock-box for emails you're tempted to spend too much time re-reading and analyzing (like those from past/future romantic interests). You'd forward the email to another address, which would somehow remove it from your inbox and return it to you after a standard amount of time (two weeks to a month, say).
Another "what is a user worth in revenue" thread
Sorry if this has been debated again and again, but I haven't really seen many conclusive answers.

From my personal, very limited amateur web-game example, I get about ~$150 in google ads for my ~400 player game. Those 400 players are active considering they have used the game in the past 7 days. Users who haven't are deactivated. I'm convinced that with proper Google Ads optimization (there's only a single, badly placed ad right now), this could be doubled at least.

So, this makes me conclude that a user-year (a user being active on the site for a year; or two users a half year each, etc) is worth $1 in ads. Is that a realistic estimate? Or is it completely bogus or too dependent on other factors. Note that I'm talking about browser games, where users have fairly typical usage patterns regardless of the game itself.

Additionally, consider the "freemium" model (optional premium account with perks). Pricing is usually around $4 or $5 per month, let's round that to $50 per year. With conversion rates between 1% and 5%, a rate of 2% is a realistic example. 2% of $50 is ... $1.

So, the total user base yields another $1 per user-year for premiums. Is that realistic as well?

This means a user-year is worth $2... I know these are napkin-style calculations, but as far I see it the orders of magnitude make sense for a browser-based game.

Please enlighten me if I'm wrong.
Don't forget the original Cambridge,
it's especially good for biotech.

Mik

P.S. Cambridge MA was renamed from Newtowne in 1638
as a publicity stunt when Harvard was formed
This one has been bugging me too. There's simply too much noise and not enough signal in most of those sites. Feedhub looks like an RSS filtering/recommendation engine. I'm not sure if that's the same thing we're talking about.
I wonder why this needs to be a web service, unless they do the "people who liked x also liked y" thing. Otherwise, I'd rather have this as a local app.
Check out Lunarr - I think they do something similar.
This comment system is inspired by a post on Jack Slocum's blog, entitled "WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI"
http://www.jackslocum.com/blog/2006/10/09/my-wordpress-comme...
The language is less important than your design choices. If you need to support tens of thousands of concurrent connections and want to do it efficiently you should almost certainly use a non-blocking event-based approach. Spawning thousands of processes (even threads) might seem convenient but it's also much less efficient and a headache in its own ways.

Take advantage of epoll under Linux and you can probably use any language you want. Brad Fitzpatrick wrote a Jabber server (DJabberd) in Perl that can handle 300k connections in 1GB of memory. It depends what you're doing, but it's highly likely you don't need to choose a painful language for the sake of efficiency.
I've been thinking about this for a long time now.

The idea is sound, but I really think what it comes down to ultimately is People. If you have a bunch of the right people working together, previously difficult things suddenly become possible.

My idea revolves like yours around shared infrastructure. I would like a physical space, with servers, domain registration, payment gateways, and networking already set up, where groups of people can congregate for a long weekend of hacking. But to really produce quality work, it depends on the quality of the people, and the passion they have for the particular project.

Perhaps with enough different groups congregating often enough, eventually good ideas can take shape and good work can be done. I feel that creation of a platform may be aiming too high, I would be happy for just any type of startup to be created out of it.

So I think the idea has merit in some shape or form, but to my knowledge it hasn't been successfully done before.
I prefer Pythons: http://pythons.com/
I'm working on something similar at SeekSift http://www.seeksift.com/ though I'm still tweaking the recommendation engine.
The world just got unbundled. Like it or not, there you are.
Not at all ridiculous. In fact, I was thinking something very similar about a week ago but I didn't really dwell on it. After reading PG's most recent article, a couple things he pointed out seemed like a solidification of what you and I are thinking. Particularly, the last section: 'Faster Advances'. I don't want to be redundant, so if you don't remember, here you go: http://paulgraham.com/webstartups.html.

More broadly, simply sharing some of the things you mention is cool and all, but what if teams with complementing ideas collaborated. If our team is accepted, I'm definitely going to keep an eye out for teams who may be in related problem domains, or are approaching issues we expect to encounter further down the road.
http://www.cocomment.com/ is what you're after I think
You can always live/work outside London and hop in for the events+networking. Brighton is particularly popular, though I am partial to Bristol myself.
Wi-Fi Detector Shirt, Self-Detects Geeks
Not if you use EC2.
Cheap startup hubs probably don't exist. They are hubs because everybody moves there, which inevitably makes housing expensive. The trouble with London is that if your funding is in USD or EUR the exchange rate exacerbates the problem.

There are upsides too, however. Many european countries require entrepreneurs to make very high social security contributions regardless of earnings. In some cases as high as EUR 350 for earnings of 0, so that counts towards the burn rate as well. In the UK the basic rate of NI contributions for the self-employed is GBP 2 (USD 4) a week, which covers health insurance excluding dental.

(currency symbols don't appear to work here...)
Your calculations sound straight forward, but they obviously apply to you only. Each site is different. Google, for example, makes a lot more per user (I would guess) because people go there to look for specific things, and Google offers targeted ads that pay several dollars per click in many cases.
Assuming things go about as well as you expect.
The first answer was better. No one knows. We're asking for your best estimate.
Facebook Mass Rejects All fbFund Applicants And Starts Over
Twitter Testing Text Footer Ads
2 Common missteps in negotiation and why you need to avoid them.
I don't like the idea and here's why.

At the earliest stages, you don't know what will give you a competitive advantage. You may think you do, but you really don't. As things get off the ground, you may find yourself in a totally different business that what you planned.

I have had several experiences where I rolled out several tools needed to do the real work, and it turned out that the tools became the product. Who knew. Good thing I didn't share them or I would've ended up with nothing.

Finding a community of like minded people, either in person or a place like here is a great idea. Sharing what you've got before you know what's really important might not be.
I left a startup last year (poker company). I was a founding member. We chose to go with c++ for the backend architecture and custom client. My choice was python but I was overruled. It took a LONG time to develop a C++ server, the client was more simple.

Security in c++ is hard, memory leaks are hard, crashing on high load is hard to debug. What I learnt from this was... servers are hard and takes a long time to debug. Going with python/perl/C# would have saved us time on memory leaks and some of the crashing (no buffer overruns etc). The downside would be that the server may be slower. BUT the cost to develop the C++ server was about the cost of 40 servers so we could have written a slower app that scaled and bought more servers and rackspace. I estimate choosing c++ added about 6-8 months to the task. Even as I left, while relatively stable the code is brittle and there is only one engineer left who knws the code and he is too chicken to change anything. Launch pressures meant there was 'not time' for unit tests (plenty of time to dig a large hole though)

Think hard about your requirements. Most severs spend most of their time waiting. Either the filesystem, database or on high load reading from memory/swap. So the CPU is often under utilised. Interpreted languages while slower can give a similar performance profile to c/c++ but with more cpu utilisation. When you have a LOT of sockets open you can spend a lot of time waiting for the kernel to poke you (even with kqueue or io completion ports).

Either way, don't write the underlying server code yourself there are frameworks in ALL languages that will get you 90% of the way. Remember scalability is a 'nice' problem to have as it means you have customers. Concentrate more on scaling across more machines as they are a LOT cheaper then engineering times.

good luck
In terms of capabilities that users want, I'm right. In terms of making the UI intuitive for the common user, obviously my solution isn't the answer.
Thank the lord someone uploaded this. I've been looking for this PBS documentary for quite some time. Still looking for the sequel though: "Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet."
LPTS,
You bring up good points. Self-reports are notoriously unreliable (like eye-witness testimony) however, it is still use-able data. In terms of missing days, the questions can be ordered and repeated to those who miss. In terms of false correlations, you can reduce this by being careful about how you use and analyze the data-set. Multiple regression analysis can be dangerous--it's all in how it is used. If you limit the items you correlate to those for which you have a hypothesis, minimally this data should be valuable in that manner.
What reddit taught me about startups: "because it's your damn job"
Hard Drive IO Limiting Factor--seek or rpm?
Socratic Blogging. Two or more (real or fake) people have a conversation about a topic and it's posted as a blog entry. I think it'd make for a really interesting new genre of blogs very different from the traditional essay style. A web-based Ajax chat style writing system and an IM client plugin as well, would make it super convenient and painless to create new posts. Traditional bloggers might occasionally do these coop posts together, others might do this type alone.

I had this idea because friends and I sometimes talk on IM about a topic and the chat log turns out to make quite interesting reading.
That is an extremely helpful article.
It would be good for interviews, which are interesting mainly for their semi socratic nature. I posted a similar idea:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65083
http://www.tipjoy.com/our2cents/2007/10/real_liveblogging_li...
Isn't the point that almost everything is in the execution?
Good point that the way you want to present yourself on the web isn't necessarily the way you get perceived. This is kind of like the difference between procedural and event-driven programming. We design sites as collections of "fuctions", but most of the time people just pop in from Google for one thing -- that's how we get to introduce ourselves to the world.

I know I have a technology blog where I'm getting between 5 and 10K unique hits per month. When I designed it, I thought how people would come to the main page, read what it's all about, check out the topics and latest comments, maybe take a look at the feed What I'm finding is that Google is dumping all kinds of traffic onto my site due to searches for Salma Hayek, Pluto the Disney Cartoon, the Sweedish Bikini Team -- all kinds of extraneous stuff I added to mostly technology posts in an attempt to keep things light. I love ya, Google, and I love the traffic, but I never thought it would turn out this way.
Umm, I'm doing this right now.
Google to Put YouTube Videos on Its Ad Network
"when I find a bug in my software"

Hrmm... for me, mostly it's a case of finding bugs in IE, and creating work-arounds in my own code.
Business Plan Competition ..
Ask YC: what if I have more than 2 ideas?
Is it good to apply separately or just include in one application?

What are the pros and cons of having multiple ideas?
One of my friends working on this, http://www.peerdecision.com/
Bangalore, yes. Mumbai, not really.
The university of waterloo is the best engineering university in Canada but I think Ottawa has far more startups than Waterloo.
No. London shares with NYC the problem of being a big city and thus expensive to live in. Some of the other places are quite cheap. SV is. SF is expensive, but SV is a huge expanse of cheap, month-to-month apts.
"...when searching for specific information on a website, [people] focus only on the parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks."

Hm, perhaps Google's success in advertising isn't because the ads are more relevant to the content, but because they look like relevant content.

I bet you all were "early adopters" of banner-ad blindness. You're probably blind to Google ads now, too. (I almost never click on them.) So... how long will it be before Google-ad blindness kicks in for the general population?
CNET Founder Shelby Bonnie Unveils His New Startup: PoliticalBase
I look at it as the reserve price of an auction. Ultimately, a startup is worth what people are willing to pay for it, but under a certain price, I'd rather hold onto the startup and try to grow it than sell it.
Yahoo promotes new social network.....on Facebook
The Paradox in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Summary quote:

"Most of us don't want wealth just to have wealth. We want the secure feeling we think wealth will give us. Once we have that feeling we believe we will spend our time doing things we love rather than worrying about money. But you'll never get there unless you risk your economic security. You have to act in spite of your fear."
Another bit of data pointing at having a cofounder as being critical.
Tractis: Signing Contracts Online
Duelnode: Structured debate.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/10/duelnod...
Great post. Same sentiments here.

The motivational poster he cites is hilarious: http://images.despair.com/products/demotivators/motivation.j...
LOL... no, no derivatives of any kind. :)

Just a fan of the book. It's excellent!
What about Gmail and Calendars? I was under an impression that both of those use it. Maybe even Google Reader... not sure.
Uhmm... Pownce?
In my first draft, I just put the opportunity costs we would have for the three months. That's nothing like millions... Obviously if the startup seems set for success, it would affect the price. But by lowest offer I assumed the worst case. If it doesn't take off (and no remedy is in sight), there would be a line where instead of taking money for it, I would perhaps still prefer to be allowed to call it mine.
Thomas all set to appeal the $220,000 RIAA payment
I would have to disagree here...

Perhaps Ottawa HAD more (in the telecommunications boom), but Waterloo is really bustling with startups.
Some examples:
Open Text, Rim, Maple, Descartes and the list goes on and on.
Also, a lot of companies are putting offices into Waterloo's research park, including Google.
Good point. So, is there a way to tell Google to ignore specific keywords on a site?
I wonder how many startup founders regret being acquired early.

Not implying reddit was acquired early, just more of a general question. I'm talking more about the Flickr's of the startup world.
This is an excellent point. Had Joel Spolsky 'shared' the bug tracking system in such a cooperative pool, things would have turned out dramatically different for FogBugz.
Non-Profit Tobacco.

Find a way to give that majority of smokers, those who don't like what they do (but do it anyway), the ability to purchase high-quality cigarettes whose 'profits' go to cancer research and as-effective-as-possible anti-smoking campaigns.
How the new Google PageRank will Affect Startups.
Isn't that just a description of Facebook itself? The message system is the e-mail, the Notes is the blogging, and the Wall is the chat...
Attend the BarCamp, in November I think.
Permanent relief from the password hell. And it should NOT be a "keyring solution".
I don't think flash would be necessary, though I guess it's potentially easier to collect a lot of data...

What about creating it into an ultimate medieval tower defense? Perhaps a machine learning War Craft II. I don't know.
How about a start-up coop on a beautiful island somewhere?

Cheap-as-dirt living, gorgeous surroundings, fun as anything.

Get enough of us out there and we'll have that spark of community we all need, too.

Even if a group doesn't want to ultimately headquarter there due to distance from end-users/investors/whatever, set up a place where groups/duos/individuals can come for retreats (2 days --> 6 months, whatever you desire).

I'd go. Heck, I might do it myself.

(I'm not saying it wouldn't take some ingenuity to make this work practically. But it just might be worth the trouble.)
I'm not sure whether you are referring to the same argument, but I think I remember that Bruce Schneier talks about the lack of correct positives that makes the application of data mining methods to terrorist incidents useless. He makes the point that very few positives for the system to learn from combined with a very large number of variables causes a huge number of false alarms (not sure if I remember all he said correctly).

So it's all about how many confirmed positives you have and whether you have reliable data on them. It works very well for credit card fraud because there is a sufficiently large number of actual fraud cases, you have reliable data about them and false alarms do not cause major disruption.

I agree with your concern about the reliability and completeness of data. I still think it's an interesting idea if there was a way to extract the data from a reliable source instead of working with what people claim to be the case.
PHP, Ruby or .Net
Which would be the best to learn to design a social network site from scratch?
That actually might work...
Do NOT use the 7+-2 principle as a guideline for building navigation menus. The context of the Miller experiment was entirely different. IIRC it involved rote memory, which is not the case for navigation menus.

A more pertinent number is 4. A paper last year found this to be the upper limit of recall of disparate visual items. The phonological route and visual route do not have the same capacities, and navigation menus are more visually-driven. The other point I would cite is the subitization limit, or the intuitive sense of visually-presented quantities, is efficient up to 4-5 items. Granted, nav menus can stay open, therefore require less brainpower to maintain in memory, which can push the upper bound, but strive for 4-5, rather than 5-9.

Oh yeah, also, good job for citing the Magic 7 and giving me 30 items to remember... (it was helpful though, thanks)
Natural American Spirit helps native americans, right?

"[they] purportedly donate a portion of their revenues to Native American charities."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_American_Spirit

That isn't too far off.

Either way, with taxes, lots of money goes to government mandated campaigns against smoking, tort damages, and miscellaneous government pork. You can't really control that.
I could be wrong, but based on my personal experience Japanese culture at large frowns heavily at risk (especially if you've already failed once). People tend to look down on you unless you work for big respectable company 'x' with respectable title 'y'. Not to mention it's very difficult living on the cheap in Japan. You'll have much better luck in NY...
They can be down for 7.3 hours in one month, and all you get is a 25% discount?

They would have done better to say nothing.
Schwag for Startups (Free Stickers)
I am the creator of StartupSchwag.com, a subscription tshirt/chochki of the month club. We currently print one startup's shirt per month (startup pays nothing for this) and accept stickers/chochkis for distribution to a growing international subscriber base.

Today I'd like to announce that we'll print stickers for startups, 5-10 startups per month, at no cost to them, and ship the startup the extras. That means if we do a run of 2500 and only ship 1000 to subscribers, each startup gets free sticker schwag to do with as they wish.

Please, interesting logos, clever designs. If it looks like "My First Logo," it's not as interesting to me or anyone receiving it, and it probably won't get used. Please be in a public beta or launch state. YC/Tech Stars/Euro equiv startups will receive priority - I'd prefer to help early stage startups spread the word, but there's 'early stage' and 'hatched last weekend and nobody's seen it yet.' - the former is preferable =)

Please contact me if you're interested.

http://www.startupschwag.com/ | schwag@startupschwag.com
my only concern with Bejing as opposed to Shanghai is how well they enforce certain laws (since it is the capital). Granted fighting corruption is one thing, but the better they enforce laws like censorship (that hinder creativity), the worse for business in general...

Look at Singapore (which is the model that China eventually wants to be for better or worse)... it's so repressed and 50's clean that you have natives with masters degrees who don't know how to have sex (no I am not making this up - this was news five years ago).

Singapore offsets its population and innovation problem through gov sponsored immigration (typically favoring the west) and a laissez faire attitude on taboo industries like biotech (an attitude that China shares).