Here are a few links from my bookmark folder on the subject, in no particular order:

How to use contrast to your advantage- http://www.gomediazine.com/design-tip/rule-three-contrast-co...

Use colors that have varying intensities, not just differnet colors. Focus on how it looks in greyscale http://www.gomediazine.com/design-tip/becoming-a-master-desi...

Visualizing Fitt's Law http://particletree.com/features/visualizing-fittss-law/

Software Has personality. http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2007/09/lightrooms_g...

Copy sites you like, such as: http://orderedlist.com/articles/single-line-css#comments or http://www.joyent.com/

How to make your designs suck less: http://jimwhimpey.com/blog/2007/simple-ways-to-help-your-des...

Load faster, by doing a low-res version first. http://www.wait-till-i.com/index.php?p=464

How to do sound design http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/why_is_that_thing_beeping...

More on Sound Design http://digitalmedia.oreilly.com/2007/03/22/how-to-make-user-...

Use smart color pickers http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=6434

Whitespace Matters! http://alistapart.com/articles/whitespace

You can make a UI feel responsive, by minimizing the number of clicks http://tantek.com/log/2007/02.html#d19t1813

Write Production UIs, never use placeholders http://a-simian-mind.blogspot.com/2007/03/user-interface-is-...

A gradient Tutorial http://9rules.com/blog/2006/08/a-gradient-tutorial/

Aza's tips http://ajaxian.com/archives/death-of-the-desktop-by-aza-rask...

Context: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I like the clean, minimalistic design. While the voice explains the purpose of the site quite nicely, you need a tagline and a clear written explanation as well: if the user doesn't see the value proposition in 3 seconds, they're gone (and what if they have their sound off?)

I also like the fact that you don't have to register to use your site.

I'm afraid the collaboration and social aspects are somewhat lacking - you should focus on those.

I can see the market for your site, but do you have a solid business plan to monetize it?

(long time fan of zombo.com)

I was feeling quite confident about my team's efforts. Now I'm not so sure.

This, my friends, is web 4.0, and a lesson for us all.

That said, I feel worthy of being beaten by such a worthy competitor, something clearly at the pinnacle of not only computing, but human evolution.

Kudos to you, Zombo. You have bested us all.

It's strange they're surprised he's only 23. It doesn't surprise me. The facile "you suck" is the hallmark of the Beavis and Butthead 15 year olds on Digg.

Wow you must be fun to work with

Indeed. If an employee of mine ever said to "save this funny crap for April 1st," I'd fire them on April 1st, and tell then that I was saving it.

This time the client is the necktie trade association. Just follow the quotes: user, expert, expert, client.

Yes. And more precisely, anyone could inflate their numbers by encouraging large numbers of weak groups to apply (e.g. college students during the summer), knowing that they were going to reject them.

So if we quoted numbers, competitors would be tempted to do bad things in order to get higher numbers, and then we'd either have to the same bad things ourselves, or look as if founders liked us less.

Risk mitigation. Most large tech companies don't purchase startups for the revenue they bring in. They purchase them because they are deathly afraid that some startup will become the next big thing that renders their revenue stream obsolete. It's happened often enough that big companies have reason to be concerned: think of how the computer world would look different if IBM had bought Microsoft instead of licensing their software, or if Yahoo had bought Google when it was an early-stage startup.

If you look at the > $1B acquisitions, almost all (except Skype) have been for companies that fundamentally threaten a large company's business model. If Google hadn't bought YouTube, Viacom's lawsuit against it might have set a precedent that literally puts Google out of business. If EBay hadn't bought PayPal, it would've opened the door to a payment service that wasn't controlled by Ebay yet was frequented by all of EBay's customers; it's not a huge leap for Paypal to start offering its own listings then.

Startup founders have the opposite risk profile: their wealth is all tied up in one company, so if they don't take over the big company's market, they get nothing. Most founders would rather take their $40M payout and diversify.

So basically it comes down to risk aversion. Say that a startup has a 1% chance of displacing the big company (worth $100B for the sake of argumentation), and a 99% chance of eventually failing. For a big company, 1% is far too large a chance of losing everything, particularly when they have the cash & stock to avert the possibility entirely. For a founder, $1B is a helluva lot of money, and far better than a 1% chance at being the richest man in the world yet a 99% chance of nothing.

There's also a moral hazard issue, in that the people actually responsible for footing the bill are stockholders, yet the company executives have a far stronger incentive to not look bad by botching an acquisition than to save $1B. Many money managers hate acquisitions, because it's by far the favorite way to destroy shareholder value. But few CEOs will be replaced for making too many acquisitions, while it's almost guaranteed that they will be replaced if they fail to make the acquisition that becomes a major competitor.

A pithy way to put it might be "Big companies are driven by fear, yet startups are driven by greed." That gives both of them incentives to agree on an acquisition price higher than fair market value.

yeah paul graham, you really showed me. internet is pretty serious business!