skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've done this with my first three companies. Just use one of your parent's address for incorporating. Depending on the state, they usually let you specify a street address and a mailing address. Get a P.O. Box and specify that as your mailing address. Then you won't have any problems with your mail being mixed up (except for the occasional piece of junkmail). It also makes it easier to change later on, since latency in address-change doesn't affect any of your mail (which will continue going to the P.O. Box).
"what the product is, why it is great, who will use it, and a rought sketch of where the money will come from"

This may sound strange, but I use the first page of my website as my "business plan". No sense working on anything else until it answers all of these questions in an instant.
We have one, but it's more a general roadmap than a specific plan that we follow line-by-line.
A) When you look at the high numbers you need to ignore scholarships as many don't qualify.
B) Its a 5 year school so 30 * 5 = 150k not 120k
C) You could be making a lot of money if you worked instead of spending all that time in school.

Finally, you could get significant returns if you invested your first years tuition by the end of 5 years.
Did he really? I thought he just proposed an improvement to it or something like that.
It may sound strange, but I think that it is actually a pretty good idea. Needs to be coupled with thoughts on what direction ou are moving in etc. of course.

But the general thought isn't bad at all.
I carry a hard copy of it everywhere. When anyone asks what I'm working on, I hand it to them. If they don't "get it" immediately, I know I still have work to do.
"Having both the skill to build something and the wisdom to know what to build in the mind of a single person is much stronger than having 'business people' and 'developers'."

I very much disagree, though with the specifics rather than the general point. It's very difficult to keep a full mental model of both the technology you're using and the problem you're solving in your head at once. Either you veer over to the technology side, building something that's cool but not as useful to users, or you veer over to the business side, coming up with great ideas for users that can't be implemented in any feasible time period. This is one major reason why startups can fail to build something people want.

You need at least two people that trust each other to keep everything centered - one to build things and one to critique what's been built and suggest ways that it can be made more user-friendly. It doesn't have to be hacker + businessperson: hacker + hacker with each of them writing code and then looking at what the other has written for improvements is probably more efficient, and gives you a swing person if you need something implemented fast. But it's very rare that it can be done by a single person.
qooxdoo: javascript framework for desktop-like web apps
The simplest technique would be for the YC News gods to grant us a "report SPAM" button. The site would then be self moderating.

I would also suggest something like granting karma points for sniffing out SPAM in case the YC News gods agree that a reported link does indeed turn out to be spam.

Alternatively, a system of "open moderation" would be good as well (to lessen PG's load). In this case, moderation of the site would fall upon a rotating schedule between users that have reached a certain level of karma points. Like jury duty, you have a queue of sites that have been flagged for review, and the member's job is to merely approve of something as spam or not and have it dealt with. A link would have to be scrutinized by the random "committee" (which ideally should be a random percentage of YC News members on a regular schedule) and a majority vote would determine collectively if a link is spam or not.

---------------

Apologies for making this post so long....

1) have a "report" button

2) who ever is on "spam patrol" would see a reported link highlighted

3) "spam patrol" would have their "report" button substituted by a "confirm" button

4) after enough of the "spam patrol" confirms a link as spam, then the link is automatically marked for deletion

The advantage of such a system is that there would be some filtration of the links and spammers would (hopefully) be discouraged.

An "emergent" advantage would be to uncover spam sites. I can even imagine a number of social sites adopting a scheme creating a collaborative spam filter (ok, yes I'm spinning this out of control, but what the hell, I'm sure everybody here thinks like this!). This would be a social solution to a technical problem.

If reddit had such a system, then a collaboration between YC News and reddit would pre-emptively eliminate confirmed spam sites from one another. Using this example, a number of social sites could immediately benefit from an open database of spam filtering (akin to the use of OpenID). So a confirmed spam site on reddit would automatically translate into a confirmed spam site on YC News, or whoever else subscribes to such an open database.

Is this too complex of an idea???
See those arrows? That’s human moderation. Just don’t click on the up arrow if you think it’s spam.
Microsoft's mobile mistake
negative karma should lead to a user ban.
Maybe this is a good time to start allowing negative karma and downvoting of submissions. If someone has negative karma, then they can't submit until they start making good comments at least.

I know pg is worried about mass downvoting, and I think a good way around that is that downvoting anything costs one karma point for the person doing the downvoting. That way you only downvote things that really deserve it... And if you're a chronic downvoter, you wouldn't be able to do it for long as you'd hit Karma 0.
The marginal cost of selling software is $.00 pretty much. So MSFT operates on a what-the-market-can-bear approach, not a costco-style mark-up-everything-10-percent appraoch.
+infinity for nap room
Well, last I heard he was making $40K/month and he had received valuations of $1-2M. Pav says some crazy stuff but it's usually backed up by his experiences.
I'm not sure anyone has ever accomplished anything when they set out to "leverage other people."
I read Practical Common Lisp and OnLisp on my Windows Mobile phone while commuting.

Incidentally, being able to manipulate the file system is the biggest advantage I see in WM vs iPhone. At least for geeks.
Read transcripts from every speaker of the house you've never heard of. Being powerful but creating nothing memorable is an indicator.
I thought it was rather good.
Another possibility: watch a few speeches on Youtube, and write down the applause lines.
Wikipedia says that while other people worked on it earlier, PG's essay really popularized it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering
iReport: CNN's new user-generated news site
That doesn't sound strange - that sounds like something you'd do if you wanted to create a business :)

Btw, what is your website url?
signing up for bank and merchant accounts
I think more ideal would be two hackers who understood business, or possible one hacker who understands business and one business person that can hack. The point is, no silos!
Turn Your Flickr Crush Into Real Romance
How about restricting the number of submissions allowed in a given period, scaled by karma? This would encourage people to only submit meaningful news, and it would also offer proactive protection against spam from low karma users. Just a suggestion.
Yup, I think pg mentioned before that there's a list of trusted users who can edit missleading titles, delete posts or change urls. (In the early days pdf links got changed to scribd links instead by moderators)
Vista is a great example for an essay like this: much of its brokenness is arguably a direct result of design decisions that were driven by entertainment-industry IP lawyers.

The other factor affecting Vista, which Greenspun refers to obliquely when he talks about the "natural progression of an industry", is that the pioneers in a field get to work in an open space. Backward compatibility is not an issue. Installed base is not an issue. Your market is too small to have developed hundreds of independent, politically powerful splinter groups that are each fighting for their own agenda. And your competitors are too few and too poor to have hired lawyers to scrutinize your every move and force you to document exactly how you answer the phone.

This is the real point. In typical Greenspun fashion, he is pretending to call us all stupid, but he doesn't really mean that we're intrinsically stupid. He's appalled by the fact that we live and work in a tangle of legal nonsense that makes us effectively stupid.
You can't be employed by the company you own. And you can't share the ownership to avoid this restriction. As far as I know, they don't care are you 1% or 100% owner. So, this means neither H1B or EBGC are possible. And yes, among with solid revenue stream, ability to prove that you're not "one man shop", and that you're not trying to make your business of solving other's immigration problems, the company also needs to be able to pay competitive salary within the market range. So, if you're getting H1B for Software Developer, I'm pretty concerned that you'll ever get approved if your company is stating your salary is less then 65K annually (in CA). And, as far as I know, the companies and visa applicants are getting audited very often to assure that they keep the salaries not lower then stated.
Unpublished. But you'll be one of the first to see it.
A bit of topic, but that reminds me of Isaac Asimov's Foundation. At one point, a politician comes, makes a big speech with lots of promises and everybody is happy, until a day-long sophisticated semantic analysis of the speech reveals that it was actually devoid of any meaningful content.
Ouch-- I can't wait until the first YC lynch mobs begin.
I can see how this has huge revenue potential ala Hot or Not and a great potential to go viral. Catchy names (addHer, addmired) too! You should try harder not to look like another Hot or Not! The jittering photos are a little annoying!
I think including potential wages is at least a little weaselly. Besides the fact that you can work while going to school, get scholarships, etc, you could just as easily say that any lost earning potential while taking classes should quickly be made up by the difference in your wages from having a degree.

Even if you do, 50K/year as a high school graduate (at least in the US) is being pretty optimistic. I don't think most of my friends in non-technical programs didn't even make that out of college. The average starting salary for a BS CS grad even is probably still only around 50K.
I've lived in the US, and I had to look at the dollar bills I happen to have in my wallet. Green, yes, but did they add other colors recently? Not a very foreigner-friendly question.

The problem with technical questions, is that no matter how simple, people here will argue about the correct answer ;-). Unless we just give up and say that "It depends" is always correct.
What about adding a hidden field to the submission form where if it contains a value upon submission, it's obviously spam filled in by the bot (if these are bots and not actual people doing the submitting). Ryan Grove uses this technique on his blog and said it eliminated a lot of spam:

"Yes. Riposte uses a very simple but very effective form of comment spam prevention: the comment form contains extra fields that are hidden from normal browsers via CSS but look like comment fields to spambots. When the form is submitted, if any of these fields contain content, Riposte denies the request.

This technique has been in use for over a year at wonko.com and has been effective at stopping virtually all automated comment spam attempts."
This may sound weird, but I've come to prefer lying face-down on the floor with a laptop in front of me. I think it's because that's how I did homework as a kid (in front of the TV).

So my ideal office would have to support that.
The easist method depends upon your customer. Therefore, it could be beneficial to implement multiple payment mechanisms. Customers could pay through the most familiar and trustworthy mechanism. You could most heavily promote the method that takes the least commission. This would allow new and experienced users to select the most optimal method autonomously.

An often overlooked payment method is sending a cheque in the post. For many people, this is considered to be a superior channel for security. It also allows payment for those without a credit card. It also increases trust because you have to provide an accurate postal address. From my experience, sales by cheque equal sales online. Therefore, you can double sales with this option.
I'm not sure anyone has ever accomplished anything when they have not leveraged other people.
It's funny that you all say that about 7 Habits. It's the hardest for me to get through. I only got through the first chapter and I haven't learned anything that I can really use.

FAW is great for case studies of other startups (both successful and otherwise).

HTWF I've also only gone through the first chapter but I've gotten a lot more out of it than 7 Habits.
When I first heard the term "Bayesian spam filtering" and its description, my response was, "Oh. I thought that's how they always did it." I didn't realize it was a big innovation.
The fifth year is quite possibly a year of work-study, like in my degree. Either that or adding a second degree/masters, which is going to increase earnings potential hugely.

I have seen statistics before about how having a degree positively influences your earnings potential, but I have yet to see anything but "feelings" from those claiming going to college has a negative effect.

If we're going on anecdotes, I seriously doubt I could have made that much going into work straight out of high school, and I seriously doubt there are many people that could.

I would bet there's a more people that could qualify for significant scholarships than could make significant money going straight into work.
damn hes one well connected guy. If he wasn't I am not so sure people would of gone for it.

seems like a nice guy too.
PermissionToSubmit = (Karma > x) * (AccountDaysOld > y)
Everyone heard of that project that was dubbed "TeslaNet", right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardenclyffe_Tower
I wonder what would the world be like if that had been successful.
Spam blocking is probably a 1 liner in Arc.
"(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active."

In the following passage Orwell is describing a particular type of bad writing. Notice however that every single sentence is passive. Notice especially the first sentence. It contains an irony bomb.

"In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth."
Short term solution: Ban account 1podgirl.

I like the idea of prohibiting posting of articles until karma reaches a certain threshold, and limiting the amount of comments/hour by karma. So,

for karma < 10
comments/hour = 1

for karma >= 10
comments/hour = karma/10
That will work only if the worthless submissions don't overpower us...
The problem with down-voting is that there is no distinction between a spam report and judgmental calls on the content of a link. It changes the dynamic and the quality of links that make it to the top.

Having recently come from reddit (and I must say I absolutely LOVE the energy of YC News!!!), I noticed that the down-voting makes submission more competitive and it makes the site less varied and more homogeneous.
Shame on me. As usual, a Greenspun article that is 99% quality and I pick on the sore thumb at the end. I must be still be a little irritable after filling out that 8th TPS report.

I still say Microsoft is not representative of today's best and brightest. When you have $20 billion cash, 85% market share (in some sectors), and total PHB support, you don't have to be as good. So they aren't.
There was a good thread about this a couple months back on 37Signals blog (http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/753-ask-37signals-how-do-...):

The thing to note here, in my opinion, is to not implement it as they have. Do not store the credit card numbers on your own system. Instead, read through the comments. A few people talk up TrustCommerce (http://trustcommerce.com/), and it looks pretty good .

Note: I've never used it, just pointing out what others said. I do plan on using it sometime, however.
Wow. makes me feel old. I used to curse Netscape (if I wasn
't cursing IE) and curse IE (if I wasn't cursing Netscape) about DOM support. I used to write Javascript to programatically manipulate DHTML layers by hand and use Dan Steinman's DHTML library. It's so much easier now using Prototype et al.
I'm currently writing one.

My business is struggling to get a merchant account because it's basically a 3rd party processing app, which most banks wont touch with a barge pole.

The business plan will be used to illustrate what the business is, how we expect it to make money and how we expect to try and grow the business. Using that we can hopefully either convince a bank that we're not the fraud risk they assume we are, or attract an investor to give the company more respectability..
We've written a web-based accounting system that integrates with Authorize.Net's AIM API. It's kind of like NetSuite, but a lot less expensive.
Having been through this experience, I think the best way is to try and get a job in the US with a visa, then work on the startup on the side. If you can get funded, everything gets a lot easier. Unless of course you're wealthy to start with.
Economic Depression Risk Might Force U.S. Govt to Buy Assets
Check this chain out.. Drop me an email (pete at songkick dot com) if you want any info, looked into this pretty extensively..

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=67268
Thanks for the Dan Steinman reference. I remember learning some pretty cool javascript hacks from his site years ago. Anyone who hasn't seen it oughta take a look.

http://www.jalix.org/ressources/internet/dhtml/_dynduo/dyndu...
This would incentivize some of the insidious viral marketers that leverage social news sites to create fake personas out there and eventually masquerade submissions for profit... that is if YC News faces the problem of large numbers.

Also makes YC News elitist as well as shuts out new members, which I think would defeat the purpose of such a site. Fresh blood helps the mental juices flow as do varied ideas.
I also use this technique for SeekSift.com (I first saw it on Ned Batchelder's blog http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html ), with good results (no spam bot signups so far).
It could be tricky to get right. For example, someone could censor a political blog from a social site interested in politics by spamming it to sites that are not interested in politics.

And, of course, if this kind of filtering gets popular, spammers can simply set up a separate website for each submission to a social site.
what about posts costing you karma?

maybe the post is 1 karma, and each link in the post is an additional karma point.

if it is a post of value, then you should earn at least more than 1 karma to replace it.

it makes your post an investment of karma. I think its a good lesson for entrepreneurs too.
Partially Applying Functions in JavaScript
Wow, this site has gone downhill.

The word your looking fore is showed.
Violates his own guidelines? Orwell adds to his list of rules

....(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I always get nervous when I see statements like "No HTML, CSS nor DOM knowledge is needed" but this does seem an interesting set of tools - I am looking forward to having a few more minutes to spend reviewing this properly.
I think pg has something in place already, though it takes a little time to work:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99975
BrainTree (www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com) works great. You could store CC info if you want but with their SecureVault, you can have them store it and get back a unique token for the customer. In this way, you can still process your subscriptions and charge customers each month but you store no critical CC info in your own system.
Super-fast bulk data imports in Rails with ar-extensions
They say it's for creating the company. In most forms of incorporation you need to put down an address. I ran into the same problem.
News Corp. Funds Startup Incubator
Ask YC: Lessons of an entreprenuer
Tomorrow I am going to rewrite the speech I gave just over a year ago to a group of video game developers in Green Bay, WI for a group of college students in Milwaukee. I can't of a better group to ask for some new ideas. Heck, Maybe PG as a top idea?

The original ppt can be found here:
jdavid.net/archive/speeches/Lessons of an Entrepreneur.ppt

I am wondering what other Examples, or Lessons would make for a good point in a playful discussion about entrepreneurship to college students. My guess is that only a few will actually have an interest in starting a company, but I want everyone there to get value out of the presentation. I feel like there are lessons to learn about being entrepreneurial and learning how to start something or create change.

I guess I see entrepreneurs as custodians of change in this world. We either change things through really profitable businesses, or through the creation of groups, organizations or culture that fundamentally make this world a better place.

So what Examples, Lessons would you share with a bunch of college students in IT that might be looking to change the world?

(please use the following format)
Example: {catchy title}

{story}

Lesson: {catchy title}

{story}
Also Peter Seibel's next book (http://www.codersatwork.com/) is being published by Apress as a companion to Founders At Work - I'm expecting it to be awesome.
interesting analysis
This is why the right answer is "it depends". And it's why I liked the original article, even though I disagree with the conclusion that college is a waste of time. It might be a waste of time, it might be useful but not worth the cost, and it might be enormously useful and well worth the cost.

I have a feeling a really good hacker who can do consulting work, or join a startup, could easily earn more than 50K, and might be ahead of college grads by the time they do enter the workforce. Think of it this way - you might make more with PhD than a BS, but you won't necessarily earn more than you would with a BS+6years experience, and even if you do, you have to account for lost earnings.

Of course, High School only vs. BS is a very very different equation from BS only vs Ph.D. Personally, I do think that smart people who want a career in a technology related field would be well advised to attend college.
I'm not sure anyone has ever accomplished anything arguing about leveraging people (whatever that means) either...
Heaven help us when nickb goes sour and hits us with 15 spam articles a minute!
We're only in trouble here if PG and the others used to implicitly moderate traffic are likely to upvote those links. Otherwise, we can safely ignore them. Adding a 'report submission' button might be prudent as it would make the process of eliminating junk links more efficient.
Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet
What is Motivation?