skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember, creative activities can be their own reward. In those cases profitability pretty much goes out the window.

For instance, my current side project is based on my personal interests and probably could not make for a successful business. It's an operating system project and obviously, that space is already taken. However, none of the current operating systems appeal to my technical aesthetics, so I decided to start my own.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- Mark Twain

For a true writer [hacker?] each book [project?] should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
- Ernest Hemingway

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.
-Fred Brooks

Programming...gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.
-Fred Brooks
I've planned my departure from my current gig in 2 years.

The main reason for the delay is that I need to regain my technical edge. I've been a manager for 7+ years and am not at the level I once was.

I'm also playing around with some ideas. If I end up with something interesting, then I will launch the start up earlier.
Twttr sketch: photo & explanation of original idea for twitter
I can't believe I'm quoting Donald Trump, but..

"If you're going to be thinking anything, you might as well think big."
Definitely, I agree. I should add that to my list.

I'd still develop software as a hobby even if there was no money in it.
heres the google books full version of inside intuit. this book looks awesome:

http://books.google.com/books?id=lRs_4U43UcEC&printsec=f...
I can't decide if I should laugh or cry.

Why practice (music) anymore? But think of the possibilities...
If They Say No Just Say Next by John Fuhrma
"Do Something Small Useful Now."
Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII
Great question. I think it's ok to deep-dive in (as long as you wade in). I know some friends who have always worked for themselves, and I am always impressed at their constant confidence. I observe some older folks (and even some around my age) at work and I see they're going through the motions sometimes - I don't want to be them. Build something with passion..

I'm starting to learn Ruby/Ruby on Rails on my train commute. I'm doing this to broaden my skill set (specialize in Java for my job). It's slow going at times and sometimes I only do 15 minutes a day.

A major project at work has (almost) come to an end (1.0). And I'm worried about the inevitable screeching-to-a-halt (from overtime busy to idle bored). As a result, a few of us at work are thinking of pitching a Ruby on Rails project to key decision makers (it would be perfect for the application in mind). I'm almost convinced I'll need to build the prototype on weekends (but once we have it - it will sell itself - and they'll give us the go ahead). And the best thing is when we successfully sell the prototype, I'll be able to officially use Ruby on Rails on company time..

Of course, I have a small laundry list of projects involving web mashups/integrations that I want to implement (with RoR).
Like procrastitron stated, all of them are projects I would use and if other people liked them (side benefit). I had trouble with pointers ten years ago so Objective-C is probably a stretch - I'll throw this iPhone application idea out there - I got a seeming mass text from a friend 'Hey how are you. What are you up to' - iPhone app idea: Group broadcast SMS "mail merge" - Hey <contact name>. I haven't talked to you in <rough time since last talked> What's new?'

If I had a long-term plan... it's trying to diversify my technological skill set. And, I'm constantly trying to diversify my overall portfolio with long-term side projects like Salsa dancing and public speaking (with the aim of getting out of technology [maybe]). I find I learn (about startups, business, and the business of technology) by osmosis just by reading news.YC. I love the news.YC community (8aweek keeps it from being an obsession but I cheat on the weekends).
try using instapaper with NSFW links at work. with links4later you dont have to visit a link, you can just right click it. that makes a difference to me
we're interested in Silverlight because of the way it extends the Dot Net environment into the browser.

How, exactly, does it extend the .NET environment into the browser?

I'm suspicious of claims like this. The integration of two completely disparate technologies usually gets talked up for marketing reasons, but when you try to build something on top of it, turns out to be unwieldy if not unworkable. Kind of like how Krazy Glue never seemed to hold things together the way it did on TV. :)
The biggest risk with having some technical knowledge is the knows-enough-to-be-dangerous syndrome. There's a common tendency to interfere and second guess. It can make for a hellish experience for the person doing the actual technical work. Nothing is more pathetic than repeatedly hearing things like "It will take you 2 weeks?! I could do this in 2 days!".

I think it's far better to have people who are deeply knowledgeable about the field being worked in. They'll be useful in figuring out what to build and less distracted by how it's built.
I think it might be a good idea to get a good programmer as an advisor to your startup.
Give him a small stake like a percent or two and get him to verify your software outsourcing plans. I think the bigger problem here is the doubt that you will not make it incase you dont have programmers as founders. You might or might not , but that will only depend on you trying and figuring things out - it might be the case that for your domain you absolutely need a programmer on board (or not) - but there is no real way to know as such.

Getting a programmer on board will help you with figuring out things faster than you would otherwise have done - atleast on the programming part.
Forget global warming. With 3 30" cinema displays and all of the computer and graphic power to push them, he should be more concerned with office warming!
XPRA: screen for X
I think technical skills are highly over-rated, whether it is programming or mechanical design. The most important ingredient for a successful startup is an insight into a set of problems experienced by a large enough population of potential customers that are currently unsolved and that they are willing to pay money to relieve the pain, even if it means that they might risk their career buying from an unproven startup. If they have identify such an opportunity, you can find technical talents which are highly interchangeable.
Sounds like George Bush.
I think you'd regain that technical edge a lot faster if you were the sysadmin, programmer, dba, network guy, etc.
Frog With?
Constant Contact was founded by a non-programmer ex-Bain consultant. They're public now.
the link doesn't work.
Looking for old YC post...
Fairly recently there was a post on how all the different YC startups do their design. I mean to save it but forgot and now I cant find it. Can anyone post the link? Thanks.
A founder's elderly mother in the first startup I ever joined won the lotto, in the $100 million range. He he got swept up in the general excitement surrounding the win and lost focus. The other founders booted him, but I'm fuzzy on the details because I wasn't in "the loop" at the time.
I've been pondering this question for a while and I'm beginning to believe that they will not become particularly widespread, and that it is foolish to solely rely on their success for any venture.

What these "RIA" toolkits lack is two things:

* a common, unified, pleasant look and feel. The web already has this, largely forced by the own limitations and the fact that developers now know what's sane and sensible, whereas these ugly RIAs have neither of those things and seem to be a haven for poorly thought-out applications and ideas. I've seen Microsoft showing muddled pseudo-MDI interfaces, flashy visual effects all over the place and all sorts, but none of these things actually stood out as something I'd /like/ to use. They remind me more of artist portfolio and promotional sites in Flash that no-one actually likes in the first place.

* a killer app. I've thought long and hard, but I can't actually think of anything significant (and positive) that these applications allow that the current combination of technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and Flash) don't already. Yes, Silverlight provides for easier development, but were any revolutions single-handedly brought forward solely through having a more pleasant development environment rather than anything actually better for the end-user? Perhaps if Silverlight provided 3D acceleration for in-browser games it'd be a different story, as it is I'm struggling.

Adobe Flex is likely to just continue the success that Flash already has but will not make any great strides forward beyond Flash's current popularity (which I personally expect to wane as computer speeds and browsers continue to improve). Silverlight, despite all the resources that Microsoft are pushing into it, I can't see becoming widespread anytime soon, but equally it's unlikely to be abandoned by MS, so may just be left in limbo.

Of course, I probably regret these remarks in 12 months when Silverlight is the next big thing, but only time will tell but for now I remain unconvinced.
I would say supporting a lifestyle is the #1 reason for ppl to have day jobs period. If your kid starves, who cares if your startup succeeds.
This article could of been way more interesting if the writer wanted it to. This was just like reading a press release.

I know its a known theory, but they just proved it with a massive network.
6 and 5 are closely related. The way it worked for me was to

(a) generate and *polish* the idea;
(1) make sure it is technically sound
(2) not trivial, i.e. not easy to copy
(3) maps well on business opportunities
(4) does not have IP (patents, licenses, etc) problems

(b) implement it about 80-90% through, prepare solid beta
(c) release beta and see how it's does
(d) if all goes well, evaluate the progress and estimate how long until the first revenue comes in

Steps (a.2) and (a.3) filter out A LOT of ideas. Step (b) also tends to screw things up as some ideas work out to be hard or even impossible to implement alone or on a modest budget. Steps (c) and (d) are pretty much the last mile before the full-time involvement. If the idea was thought through, the chances of failure on last two steps are not very high.

So I'd say 2+5+6 (+8) is the combination I had. Step (a) took about 2 years, (b) - under a year, (c) - 6 months. Your mileage may obviously vary :)
"Make something people want."
"Work doesn't necessarily make you happy/fulfilled but it gives you the money to do the things that make you happy"
I think, especially with Google Gears, the release of Air, and the coming Love-Train that is HTML5, that HTML, CSS and JS do constitute RIA.
The New New Thing

Founders at Work

Hackers and Painters

How To Get Rich

Competitive Strategies

The Intelligent Investor (or Security Analysis)

Liar's Poker
hey, is this it?

http://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
The second question that pops to mind is:
Can you give relate the success of the startups to the programmers/founders being "good" or "bad programmer" ?
Just curious - was a.2 something you felt like you HAD to achieve? There's tons of examples of copycat apps out there; some are just better executed than others.
I think there is a chance they will gain momentum. As long as there are multiple browser vendors with significant market share interpreting/implementing specifications, web development is going to continue to be painful. As evil as a single-vendor proprietary platform sounds (is?)...it sure would make a lot of things easier.

I've started looking into moving an application to flex for two main reasons: #1 to support no javascript. As more and more ajax features creep in, it gets harder to always provide a noscript fall-back. #2 to do away with cross browser compatibility issues.

Some concerns that I have with Flex so far are #1 no html rendering built in...so there is no way to leverage existing static html/css resources without converting to flex ui (I've read that AIR comes with Webkit, but flash in the browser does not.) #2 there doesn't seem to be good support for printing, especially compared to simple print stylesheets. Oh, and the other huge concern is how prohibitively expensive flex developer is.
Grad student, paying for my studies from a loan + small income from freelance programming, I cant afford to give up either, so I get as much done in my free time as possible.
Huh? You write CLR code, and much of the library you expect in those languages is available. I think that's what he means.
I like what you said about overall portfolio - while my main focus now is to continually improve my technical skills (I work with Rails and learn new things quite often), in the long run it is best to be well-rounded. I'm interested in learning more about business, stock and real-estate investing, and learning to speak new languages.
It was interesting a few months ago when Yahoo maps moved from Flex to AJAX. I'm assuming the problem there was the mashup factor. I think using one of these RIA platforms creates (or at least give the impression of) a walled garden, which is not what people want on the web these days.
My dad won $1 off a lotto ticket somebody gave him as a birthday present. I don't know anybody who's ever bought one.

So based on my experience, your chances are better if you don't buy a ticket. That's pretty darn unlikely.
My killer app idea for Flex. Mail-order catalogs are wildly successful. Online shopping is boring. Bring the catalog experience and add friend/social networking. Think beautifully-rendered catalog pages that turn, catalog pages that have embedded video, allow scribbled comments, tear-offs...

If anyone is serious about this, maybe we can do a prototype. Land one major niche-catalog retailer and the rest will follow...
Windows is attempting to download valuable new updates from the Internet. Cancel or allow?

There has been an error from which Windows could not recover. Windows will now restart your system. Cancel or allow?

Windows recovered from a serious error which requires updates to repair. Cancel or allow?

Windows is attempting to download valuable new updates from the Internet. Cancel or allow?

There has been an error from which Windows could not recover--

Windows has detected that your machine has been hurled from a 14th story window and will now report your malfeasance to Microsoft. Cancel or allow, bitch?
Randy Pausch (speaking of apparent barriers between you and your goals): "The wall is there for you to show how bad you want it."

(From his "Last Lecture", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo)
mail.google.com
reader.google.com
rivals4ever.com
Very interesting perspective on why Flash is not yet on the iPhone

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2007/07/08/gone-in-a-flash-mor...
9. Failed at full-time (gave myself 6 months). For now, I'm back to enjoying a job + #8.

Maybe I'll try again if I convince myself something's good enough to try for. Are you generating $500/day in value piddling around on your MacBook in Ruby? Are you generating orders of magnitude more than that?
Jamie from Snaptalent here. Thanks for the kind words.

Interesting idea. We've played around with some referral hiring ideas. The primary issue with referral hiring tends to be the fact that it is really hard to enforce extra payment from a company when somebody is hired (since they are basically on the honor system). In fact, the only successful implementation of referral based hiring to date seems to be Jobvite, which is possible because it is running internal referral hiring for a company.

Since Jobvite is run by the company, and the company is liable to keep its own employees happy, the problem works itself out. It tends to be a lot harder to enforce payment externally which is probably why companies like zubka.com have struggled.

We would certainly love it if we could easily track and charge based on hires, but it is unfortunately not a pragmatic solution yet. If you have suggestions for how we can improve this we'd love to hear from you at feedback@snaptalent.com
Of the options you offer, 2, 3 & 6, but I'm also finding the most important benefits of full-time contracting is it's a great way to meet like-minded people who could become collaborators or investors in my business.

I guess also, it's good way to stay in a positive frame of mind. In our first go at running a business, we had no idea what we were doing and after 2-3 years killing ourselves on the startup we ended up broke & depressed. If success breeds success equally failure can breed failure, and after enough time spent with that smell of 'loser' about you, you start to lose the respect of your peers and question your own worth.

It's taken me 2 years to get back on my feet to a point where life is going really well, and I'm enjoying success both in my day job and my startup. Whilst I'd love to quit full time work and focus on the startup (which I may be able to do soon with funding from some of the people I've worked for), having a day job has been great in getting the startup happening. By not relying on it for your living you have more freedom to do it right for the long term, and even if things are tough with the startup, your judgment isn't clouded by panic.
The Current State of Affairs in Pursuit of a Commonsense AI
... basically doing the right thing.
The main reason is I am going to school, and I don't see any point dropping out just to do a startup. I have many years to do that. But i am doing it on the side as we speak. I have had a few ideas over the year, although I haven't found enough reasons to devote much time to them, which is pretty much (5).

After a recent launch buy a certain fruit theme company I have found an excellent if not a killer idea to really start to think about the next steps. I am current gather people but I do have the issue with number 7 and I am not a hacker by YC's definition. I have started to gather resources (potential people) and working on the side project apart form going to school full time (computer engineering).
"... the link doesn't work. ..."

Worked for me... quick py hack to check status:

import httplib
c = httplib.HTTPConnection("www.jroller.com")
c.request("GET","/shareme/entry/startup_engineering")
c.getresponse().status

200 ... then a quick hack to check file ...

import urllib
o = urllib.FancyURLopener({})
r = o.open("http://www.jroller.com/shareme/entry/startup_engineering").read()
print r

and you get sans html ...

Many times in a start up its the human side of things that counts rather than the technology. And generally that is the attraction for outsiders as in those human relationships that get creaed an dhow they influence the technical creation.
and ...
Sure, but the devil is in the details. I'd like to know more. Assuming the Silverlight VM is not the same one that .NET apps run on, how did they do it? Did they port the CLR to a browser environment? Is it the full CLR? Does it support the full C# language? How does integration with the browser environment (dom/javascript) work under the hood? How did they get it working on different browsers? Are they completely separate implementations?

I should have clarified that I'm not criticizing Silverlight (of which I'm ignorant) as such, just expressing general skepticism based on what such claims remind me of. These things usually work, but only up to a point (well enough for marketing, that is, but not really for production). If Silverlight is better than that, I'm curious to hear more. Googling hasn't helped, because "Creating a New Silverlight Application using VS 2008" is not what I'm looking for.
Either you have an exceptionally high opinion of your idea or you have a different definition of what a 'killer app' is than me. There's a huge gulf between a 'killer app' and a 'good idea', and not being one doesn't exclude the other.

To me, a killer app is usually a single product that creates such a buzz around a new or previously underused technology or concept that causes a sudden almost universal take up by both users and developers and causes long-reaching paradigm shifts.

Google Suggest did it with Ajax, Del.icio.us did it with tags, YouTube did it to online video, Wikipedia for wikis or even the web for the Internet. Not everything becomes popular thanks to 'killer apps' and some innovations are introduced more gradually (such as Flash), but they're somewhat less common and it's generally an uphill struggle before they're adopted.
"you can find technical talents which are highly interchangeable"

Citation needed.
How is Kapor a non-coder? He was writing software throughout all of his early endeavors. He didn't outsource development of Visiplot and Visitrend.

I'm having a hard time imagining how Kapor could possibly be considered a non-technical/non-coding founder. He may not have gone to school for it...but most of us didn't learn to hack in school (if you didn't know how to hack until you got to school you obviously don't love computers enough to be a hacker).

So, sure Kapor hired additional developers, and his genius probably lies more in his dealings with other people than computers, but he was clearly a hacker from very early on, and one certainly can't hold him up as an example of an entrepreneur without any technical ability.
The Ten Commandments of Unicode
I choose to do my web application in flash for exactly same reasons that lead you to html and css. Its all interaction and not navigation.

I actually think the mixing of content and interaction that web applications have become is incredibly powerful - I think the idea that we'll prefer desktop style buttons and widgets over text links is wrong, very very wrong. And I think that's where most of the reluctance for flash apps comes from but people don't recognise it. Also web pages progressively load by default and thats important.

On a purely programming tip, actionscript 3 is a joy to program in. The flex components are good.
I stand corrected.

It is interesting that you suggest that Google Suggest did it for Ajax (I would argue that it was Google Maps that surfaced OWA-type no-page-refresh-updates). However, I think that Ajax, like Flash is a technology. The rest of the items in your list are more ideas/concepts (e.g. making it easy for the average person to use technology for their own purposes). YouTube - easy embedded videos - a difficult problem to solve - (Flash just happened to be the enabler). And we can argue that video is/was the killer app for Flash. Email was the original killer app (and still is).

Maybe there isn't a killer app for Flash/Flex. Since it is more of a technology that supplements existing technology (OS integration) than a paradigm-changing thing.
Yes. But you might have a hard time convincing technical people that there is room in their tech startup for a non-technical person.
"Fear of failure" should be on the list. A lot of people don't know how to deal with failure. Some will let it ruin them, others will rebound as you did.

Those that rebound will have undoubtedly learned valuable lessons for their next try. For people in certain situations and certain stages in life, this is too big of a risk. Failure cannot be an option.
i would pick reason #2 & #3