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mattculbreth

Actually, why not do it here? I bet that sort of functionality could be integrated somehow into this site, and from Paul's first post to the group on the reasons for the site I think it would fit in well. Then again you won't be able to use Ruby...

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sharpshoot

yeah if we fill out the profiles - and add a location and status field. It'll work pretty well at first - as you can browse people's profiles to see if they are also looking for a co-founder etc. Things can then be taken up on email

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omarish

Very good idea. We can assume most people here are in the startup community. So perhaps there should be a search by location field on a page here so that people can find each other.

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omarish

We'd like to see a geographic search so that founders can meet other founders based on where they live. http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=445

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mattculbreth

Bandwagon Launches--Use Amazon S3 service to back up ITunes libraries

http://blog.ridethebandwagon.com/

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mattculbreth

This is a cool service--I'm using it now to back up my 8GB music collection. Runs in the background on my Mac. The cooler thing is that it uses S3, which is something I've been looking at for my own startup. $0.15/gb/month for storage.

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brett

Google Apps Premier vs Standard Feature List

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html

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Harj

Passionate Users Jumpstart Creativity

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/02/21/passionate-users-jumpstart-creativity/

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Harj

Let The Best Idea Win

http://www.blackbeltproductivity.net/blog/01-19-2007/let-the-best-idea-win/

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Harj

Be Chaotic Neutral

http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2006/10/31/be-chaotic-neutral.html

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Harj

Craigslist is Worth More than eBay

http://www.startupboy.com/journal/2006/2/6/craigslist-is-worth-more-than-ebay.html

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Elfan

The inverse relationship between efficiency of your tool and your understanding of what it does

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/02/its_lunchtime_a.html

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Harj

Google Battles Microsoft Head On

http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/21/magazines/fortune/lashinsky_pluggedin_google.fortune/

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bharath

So the basic premise of your writeup is you are trying to judge how smart people are based on what they submit to this site and the content of their comments. I am not so sure I agree with that. It seems to me that starting a company requires dedication, technical smarts and technical vision. All that a good comment or submission tells you is that the submitter spends a lot of time surfing the web and is articulate. Unless you have solid reasons to believe that the two sets of qualities are strongly correlated, I am not so sure you should be even consider using this as a metric. Having worked in Silicon Valley for some time now, I can say that some of the smartest people around here have inadequate language (and by implication -- commenting) skills. Quality of people's resumes are likely to provide a stronger indicator.

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Harj

How to Advertise Effectively on Facebook

http://www.trendcatching.com/2006/12/ycombinator_sta.html

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onebeerdave

Guess this mystery paranoid entrepreneur

http://valleywag.com/tech/blind-items/guess-the-mystery-paranoid-entreprenuer-238808.php

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wbornor

Amazon's S3, pay by the byte storage.

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2/103-5652257-1707058?ie=UTF8&node=16427261&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

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wbornor

Municipal Wireless on Democratic Agenda

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/22/HNcongress07_1.html

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wbornor

Alan Turing: Codebreaker and AI Pioneer

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/423/

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adamsmith

MIT undergrad's reactions to working at a startup

http://www.xobni.com/blog/2007/01/31/kevins-thoughts/

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davidw

Yes! That's something I don't like about reddit - I spend my time giving them free content, and I don't even get a link back to my own web site:-/

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dpapathanasiou

Excellent point; YC might find that combining individuals and 2,3 member teams into new companies is where they get the most out of their portfolio. I'll probably apply for the next round as a 1-person entity myself, though unless YC announces they're changing that policy, I doubt they'll pick me.

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dpapathanasiou

The trust factor is the difference: you can't fake cool, and you can't fake integrity. Whereas eBay (these days, anyway) lets scammers "blow-up" auctions in its pursuit of listing fees (http://www.nickchandler.com/blog/ebay/nigerians-provide-free-shill-bidding-on-ebay.html), Craigslist cares about people abusing its listings -- check out Craig Newmark himself replying to a blogger's complaint about the apartment listings (http://www.mandellonline.com/?p=81#comments).

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kentbrew

Badger: Badge Any RSS Feed

http://kentbrewster.com/badger

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adamsmith

Lecture videos from my favorite undergrad CS class

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-033Spring-2005/LectureNotes/index.htm

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brett

Interesting Craig's List design breakdown

http://blog.topix.net/archives/000095.html

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kentbrew

Please, may we have a mashable feed of some sort? RSS probably wouldn't work, but a JSON object would....

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adamsmith

How a linker works [video, admittedly in RM format]

http://mfile.akamai.com/7870/rm/mitstorage.download.akamai.com/7870/6/6.033/s05/videolectures/ocw-6.033-32123-14feb2005-220k.rm

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nate

Free conference calls you can setup over the web

http://www.telejunctions.com/

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nate

We've had to be on a bunch of conference calls even as a startup. Especially as a startup it's hard to even have the partners always in the same place to talk to lawyers, clients, etc. when you don't have an office. So this thing has perfect quality and is totally free. I can't believe if even exists. Skype conferences suck in comparison.

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gustaf

CNN: Next net 25 startups to watch

http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/21/magazines/business2/nextnet_intro.biz2/index.htm

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pg

Can you let me know precisely how to reproduce it? Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

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altay

UI design: When tags work (librarything.com) and when they don't (amazon.com)

http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2007/02/when-tags-works-and-when-they-dont.php

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pg

I hope we can tell the difference between people who are smart and those who are merely articulate.<p>(We all have a lot of experience dealing with hackers, after all.)

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farmer

What a strange mix. About half seem obvious, and the other half totally random.

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danw

On Cloning YC in Europe

http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2006/04/on-cloning-ycombinator-in-europe.html

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danw

Startup Stories - Read about the experiences of startups including reddit

http://startupstories.com/

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marie

Mobile Advertising Marketplace AdMob Serves One Billion Ads in Six Months

http://sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=29293&hilite=

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danw

Where to Find a Cofounder - by Chris Campbell of Wufoo

http://particletree.com/notebook/where-to-find-a-cofounder/

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amikael

Your desktop where you are.

http://www.xindesk.com

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pg

The server's written in Arc too. I wanted to learn how to write one.

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pg

We won't clutter it up. Look how minimal the YC site itself is.

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jwecker

in that case, I _am_ excited about Arc's progress ;)

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danw

It seems the best option is to find some one you've worked with already, mainly fellow students, coworkers and open source contributers. If none of the above work for you try going to conferences and other events. Personnaly I have found barcamp to be a great event. Anyone attending will be motivated and passionate. You'll also get to see everyone present on something. If someone is presenting on the same topic in which you want to create a startup then approach them. Chances are your on the same wavelength and you can discuss your ideas together. <p>Also the presentations give you a great idea of if a potential cofounder will be good at pitching to investors and give you an oppertunity to present about your own startup idea!

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altay

Amazon: ~1.3 million tags. LibraryThing: &#62;13 million tags!

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pg

Several of the startups we've funded use S3, and they seem to like it.

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danw

When you submit a duplicate URL it sends you to the original submissions page instead

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danw

I've heard many people give this wonderful piece of advice:<p>&#34;Ignore your user's requests. They'll ask for every feature under the sun apart from the one that they really need. You'll spend all your time adding new features rather than making your site genuinely usefull&#34;<p>Unfortunatly I cant find any citations. If only quotationsbook.com was ready!

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danw

Cal Henderson also has a Carson Workshops 'survival kit' available. Its called 'Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget' and its available from http://www.carsonworkshops.com/shop/PHP_Henderson.html. I havent purchased it myself but Carson Workshops normaly produce some top notch kits.

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Harj

craig is amazing at replying emails - whenever i've emailed something about the site i've always had a reply on the same day. im usually lucky if i get an automated reply in the same week from ebay.

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vikram

The simplest repro case is <p>1. enter text for the Q. Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.....<p>2. Now hit update<p>3. Click the &#34;edit funding application&#34;<p> I expect to see the text in the last box. Instead it says nil. When I reported the bug it used to be empty. I see the same behaviour for all questions starting from &#34;Do you have any ideas you consider patentable?&#34;<p>

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vikram

For the question:<p>Why would your project be hard for someone else to duplicate?<p>I entered: Don't know<p>I can only see:<p>Don<p>I also tried Dont know<p>still only see Don

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vikram

As answer for the question:<p>If one wanted to buy you three months in (August 2007), what's the lowest offer you'd take?<p> I entered:<p> 1 million<p> all I can see is:<p> 1

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harb

Could we add a domain name that each post refers to. That way we could tell blog posts, from PG essays, from e-zine articles.

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danw

You might also like http://mealticket.wordpress.com/, its the blog of kul's cofounder.

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danw

Mealticket - Current YC company Boso blog about their experience

http://mealticket.wordpress.com/

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danw

I would quite like RSS feeds. <p>Specifically I would like an RSS feed for individual users so that if I like all the links submited by a particular user I can follow them easily.

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paul

If you don't already have a good co-founder, perhaps you are not yet ready to start a company. Try joining an existing startup instead. If it succeeds, that's great, but either way you've learned more about startups and hopefully met some people who would make good co-founders.

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scylla

Hmmm ... the author has nothing but praise for PG, but one of the main thrusts of his article was that college students should learn more Java and C#. <p>Isn't that derided as blub programing languages around here?

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nostrademons

And support paragraphs! Most informative, insightful comments take more than a couple of sentences. Currently, that makes them unreadable.

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wbornor

Google TechTalks - Municipal Wireless

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7604162891033405380&q=Google+engEDU

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wbornor

Avis 3G-to-802.11 bridge

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070102-8531.html

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wbornor

I read reddit almost exclusively through their RSS feed. Its a critical function for any site... what site owner wouldn't want to broadcast to an Opt-In audience of passionate users?

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dougw

I find the most valuable part of this article the link at the bottom pertaining to questions cofounders should mull over before entering the venture together (For ease: http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/99/Important-Questions-Startup-Co-Founders-Should-Ask-Each-Other.aspx). I have had a struggle finding cofounders that complement my style, skills, and ideas. (Any coders out there that want to talk, hah?). One thing I find missing from this list is that if you can't address these issues, or fore go these questions citing the fact that they will be addressed when the time comes (because coding is more fun) then you should rethink your partnership all together. I find it much more important to ensure that anyone I am involved with is available for open and comfortable communication about all areas of the business.

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jadams

Interesting. Perhaps they should be performing traffic analysis to see who's busy, and who's not?<p>I love to debate (reddit has saved my wife a regular earful), but I can't imagine surfing when I'm really &#34;in the zone&#34;. I tend to do more directed documentation queries and explicitly avoid sites like reddit where I'm likely to become mired.<p>So yeah, for me posting frequency is inversely correlated with how busy I am. On the other hand, all of that reading, researching and debating generates a lot of new ideas.

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jadams

I think the problem is that there are a lot of very smart people who are good at talking and generating ideas, but not so good at implementation.<p>If they're not regularly &#34;going dark&#34;, they may not have the focus to succeed at a startup.

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pg

That was a bug, not a design choice; I just fixed it.

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jadams

Can you tell us what kind of editor you're using to write Arc (and Arc code). <p>Is Arc suited to writing its own IDE?

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mrgordon

You make a good point, although it is my experience that MIT does not echo Paul's feelings with regards to programming languages. There is obviously the group of hackers at CSAIL (Sussman et al.) that swear by LISP and the functional paradigms in general, but almost every class that involves a large amount of programming is in Java. Even 6.001 is being phased out for courses taught in Python.<p>As a current undergrad at MIT, I find myself sometimes struggling to determine whether I agree with Kevin or not. It does seem that my greatest selling point is my knowledge and experience with specific programming languages like Java and not any background I have in algorithms, discrete mathematics, etc. I feel that these other tools will prove more useful over the long term, but it's sometimes hard to continue to feel that way when the need for a summer job forces one to put away the common lisp book to read javadocs.

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jadams

Can you tell us what kind of editor you're using to write Arc (and Arc code). <p>Is Arc suited to writing its own IDE?

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pg

Adam's startup is making software that works closely with Outlook. In that sort of application it might make sense to use Java or C#.

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sharpshoot

Dan thats probably jason fried of 37signals

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pg

We never proposed there was no lower bound; the goal was more to discover where it was. And we now have, I think. Though in fact the main thing we discovered was how fuzzy it is. <p>There really are people who can start a startup when they're 19. Sam Altman, the founder of Loopt, was 19. But for most people the lower bound is about 22. One reason is that most people need to experience what a job is like to be sufficiently motivated to avoid it. Another is that few people are forceful enough at 19.

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pg

This is weird. I believe you, but I can't reproduce it. Can you send me an email at pg@ycombinator.com?

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marckohlbrugge

Getting Real: Free Book by 37signals

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/

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leoc

I can't find the reference now, but I *think* I've just read something suggesting that the install process for an Apollo applet will involve an &#34;install-this-application?&#34; confirmation dialog followed by a download of 30 seconds or so. If so then Apollo's less promising than I hoped. That kind of install may be low-friction by desktop-app standards but it doesn't compare to the ease of starting a browser-based AJAX or Flash application. (Consider how easy it is to use maps.google.com for the first time.)<p>Surely it will at least be that Apollo applications will run untrusted by default, and that an already-installed app will start automatically whenever you take your browser to the URL you downloaded it from?

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marckohlbrugge

Have you used it yourself? It looks like just another webbased OS.

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farmer

Modal Box: easy Javascript popups

http://okonet.ru/projects/modalbox/

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marckohlbrugge

I don't know about the US, but in my country (The Netherlands) nobody has ever heard of Craigslist but a lot of people DO know eBay. I'm pretty sure this is in the same in many other countries and perhaps in the US too.<p>Sure, Craigslist may earn more with their fees.. but eBay can (easily) change their system to reflect Craigslist's. Also, eBay could change their fees to reflect Craigslist's if they want.

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marckohlbrugge

A bit offtopic but, does stating your application is &#34;Web 2.0-ready&#34; really help? I'm tired of everyone calling their website web2.0-ready although most of the time it looks like they don't have a clue what they are talking about. It could be me though.

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jbruin

With Craiglist (San Diego) I've managed to find two apartments, two jobs, and a plethora of unnecessary information that titillates my mind. All I got from eBay was a Lord of the Rings replica sword for my boyfriend, and I had to pay for it. Hands down, Craiglist rocks...although my girlfriend would agrue in favor of eBay as she is an aficionado of coach handbags and can find them for cheap.

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simon

This is a great book. All of the advice in t is either excellent or at least thought-provoking. Highly recommended.<p>Now, that being said, I did order a dead tree version through the Lulu.com store (very nice store, by the way) and while I love the construction and print quality of the book, the internal page layout and typography were awful. And the choice of a glossy black cover shows annoying fingerprints after just a few minutes.<p>I'm glad that I've read this book because it has given me motivation to start something. I'm trying out a couple of ideas right now to see which one I like and will run with.<p>So, thanks to the guys at 37Signals, but have someone who knows what they're doing, help you with layout next time!

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farmer

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pg

It wouldn't work to assemble teams of cofounders. A startup puts such strains on your friendship that you need it to be an established one.

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pg

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Harj

10 Ways to Make Money Online

http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/02/22/10-new-ways-to-make-money-online/

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gustaf

which ones are you thinking about?

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pg

editor: vi, ide: repl

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danw

If the startup fails then you'll have been working with other passionate people who are likely to be willing to give it another try. Perfect for cofounders.<p>There are online cofounder finder services available such as http://www.buildv1.com/ but I have yet to hear of any succesful partnership coming out of them. Best to stick with people you know in the real world it would seem.

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kf

Lightspeed Venture Grants

http://www.lightspeedvp.com/grants.asp

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danw

Project Aardvark - Movie and blog series about a group of interns creating a new product for Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek

http://www.projectaardvark.com/movie/

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danw

It's good to see someone wondering about what to do to encourage younger founder in the more risk averse EU. Events like Barcamps and future of web apps are doing a great job of raising awareness and bringing the local startup communities together. <p>One of the most interesting problems that Saul has raised is finding the right people to fund. As YC has found an application form and interview don't always give you the best way of judging a team. Demos could provide a solution, as could recommendations & references. YC news is a very interesting solution, which I'll be keen in seeing the outcome of.<p>Has anyone got any ideas about how to find the right founders to fund?

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danw

Aye, sounds like chapter five from Getting Real possibly, &#34;Start with No&#34;:http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Start_With_No.php

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danw

Quick and dirty solution is to add a quick description to the end of the title

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amichail

Movers 2.0: Follow the Web 2.0 traffic trends

http://movers20.esnips.com/

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jimdean

Skills but need a cause? Neurotech of meaning

http://boston.craigslist.org/gbs/eng/283105047.html

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chandrab

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chandrab

.

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chandrab

Having been part of a few startups before, I it definately easier to do it with a partner(s). I'm currently doing my latest startup alone - but I dont' consider myself alone. I have two great programmers, even though they are working for me...I treat them like co-founders, we discuss everything not just technical issues, business model and even their love-lives! I'm also getting assistance from my network, people I've worked in the past with and people I've looked up to during my professional career. Each one of these guys have stepped up to mat and offered me guidance each step of the way. Some mentors I talk almost on a daily basis...I treat these guys like board members/quasi-founders also because without their guidance and support I'm sure it would be much harder. Startups are not built alone - they are built by teams...these teams are composed of people who may not be traditionally considered co-founders but I'd argue they are. So I respectively disagree with YCombinator shying away from one person startups - they really need to consider the entire infrastructure. (Sorry for the long post- Chandra)

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Harj

eBay could change their fees to reflect Craigslist's? you mean eBay could make 90% of their site free to use?<p>hmm i'm not sure how well that would go down with their shareholders!