skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with the sentiment of the article, although the title is a bit misleading. It's not like you were meant to be a boss either, which is running a company is about once you get past the startup stage. I'd say the message is that if you can't be a boss yourself, try to make sure that your boss doesn't have a boss (i.e. join an early-stage startup).

Large companies have many other drawbacks besides the hierarchical structure. I've worked for companies of all sizes, and these are the things I particularly disliked about large ones:

- Information travels slowly up and back down. Decisions take time. For this reason many projects, especially those having to do with rapidly changing technologies, just cannot be done at large companies.

- Sometimes your work gets lost in the noise. Your entire project may be canceled and most of the company won't notice it. One of the perks of working for a startup is the feeling of being in charge of things and knowing that your work is immediately visible.

- Human relationships do not respect the hierarchy, so there may be conflicts between random pairs or groups of people. The larger the group, the higher the complexity of politics. This non-linearity is perhaps the worst obstacle when it comes to getting things done.
Mike Arrington’s dream team has wrong goal
C) The stuff is more liquid - cash, jewelry, etc
Going into the office is a great way to infect everyone else with whatever you have, thus multiplying productivity losses.

I try and actually stay in bed and read something completely unrelated to work/business/anything requiring much thinking. My personal favorite is westerns... Usually I get sick because of stress, so relaxing for a bit is usually what's called for.
I'm pretty sure to most thieves it looks just like a $500 Canon DSLR, of which there are thousands per Mark III.
Giving It Away, Making Money (can non-software companies do the free thing too?)
I looked over those products and only see download time and latency, not render time. If you could provide a link to where this feature is listed, that'd be very helpful.

What I'd really like though would just be some kind of browser performance profiler (not js profiling.)
I think that some of the better startup ideas would actually do better during a recession than otherwise. If your product or service reduces a business cost or opens up an untapped (monetary, social, or other) revenue source, people and businesses will be more likely to use your product/subscribe to your service during a time when business is slow. The two things you need as a startup are attention and early adopters. If business slows, both businesses and people have more downtime (which is just more attention in the attention pool that you can vie for) and are more receptive to novel solutions to their tight budget. (Your startup is novel, right?)

In short, businesses that increase market efficiency in novel ways seem, to me, more likely to succeed during a recession. This is so obvious that I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.
I was thinking your 10k person model sounds like how research funding works... which seems to be a moderately functional model.

With your 1000 person model, I'd do away with the boss (in the sense of hiring and firing). With that few people, you can all just work together fairly easily, with natural leaders emerging for different projects (and hiring/firing decisions can be made by the team as a whole). There is a factory in NC that makes aircraft engines that works this way, and it is quite successful. The teams are self organizing internally, and send representatives to deal with other teams and plant management.
W.L. Gore and Associates (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WL_Gore_and_Associates) is a big company that appears to try hard to avoid hierarchical structures. From a 2004 FastCompany article (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/open_gore.html):

"So Bill Gore threw out the rules. He created a place with hardly any hierarchy and few ranks and titles. He insisted on direct, one-on-one communication; anyone in the company could speak to anyone else. In essence, he organized the company as though it were a bunch of small task forces. To promote this idea, he limited the size of teams -- keeping even the manufacturing facilities to 150 to 200 people at most. That's small enough so that people can get to know one another and what everyone is working on, and who has the skills and knowledge they might tap to get something accomplished -- whether it's creating an innovative product or handling the everyday challenges of running a business."

Anyone who works for Gore care to comment on the actual practice?
Otherwise you would be, by definition, a marginal business, and that's not a good place to be (again by definition, the first one to die when things go bad).
Great idea. I'd like to see what new stuff people have been doing with js. I built http://ninjawords.com and http://jjot.com about a year ago.

I feel like 200 would be too many. with 40, you can meet most everyone there and remember faces.
A few years ago I gave my daughter a ruby for her birthday from http://www.geolite.com along with a little book on gem synthesis.
In practice that's how I'd expect/hope it would work. But while ideally the groups should act by consensus, there has to be some means of making a decision if no consensus can be reached. For groups that small, a benevolent dictatorship tends to work better than a democracy.
i think the differences are more based on the "base" install rights of ruby, vs, the base install rights of php.

many php servers do not have the option to run a cron job, and i think ruby can hold a state, where php runs the script for each request.
Ask YC: How did you name your startup?
I've been having trouble naming my startup (or renaming). I'm wondering how you guys came up with your name, what criteria you used, and how long it took?

My criteria is basically this: http://alexkaminski.blogspot.com/2008/03/naming-your-startup.html
This article points out an interesting fact about product pricing, saying it's "an easy sell at $54 a user [...] That’s almost disposable money, and was an easy pitch to most managers." but "$539 [...] is now a difficult to justify expenditure, requiring vendor comparisons, and negotiations with middle managers."

All the Basecampish web apps have this competitive edge, making it easy to justify the small investment and simple to subscribe.
Probably the best solution I've seen yet, although that has some big limitations.

What surprises me is that, in looking at all the browser rendering benchmarks online, everyone just seems to do it by hand! There must be some pragmatic way that the browser developers are benchmarking the browser speed.
The idea that there is a certain "natural" size to groups of people reminds me of the Monkeysphere essay:

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/monkeysphere.html

The size of a monkeysphere is estimated to be 150 people, which is quite a bit larger than the 10-person group Paul advocates, but I guess you need to know at least a few people outside of work. :)

I wonder if the problem with large corporations is that you don't care about the other people in them or that you feel the other people don't care about you? Certainly the people in the highest positions can't care about everyone under them -- assuming they can only care about 150 people -- so perhaps that is the limiting factor of effective size.
Everything written in the article rings true. One effect he didn't mention is that the poisonous confidence-destruction and the lack of learning are self-reinforcing. It creates a cycle which discourages quitting.

I think, though, that the effect only hits ambitious, independent people. Those with less ambition or less independence seem to enjoy themselves, and do well. (There are also a few ambitious, independent folks, who aspire for the top of the corporate ladder and have a good chance of making it. They do well when their skills are matched to the needs of a large organization.)

I used to think that when big company employees "settled", it was a gradual process that snuck up on them. Not always. I've actually had a conversation with someone in which they told me about their conscious decision to settle -- that it was better to accept the circumstances and make the best of evenings and weekends. She became upset when I tried to remind her of the higher aspirations she had just the summer before.

[I work in a big company. I'm getting out in June when I'll have the funds to not use credit cards.]
I am working on that right now. Something that is easy to remember - easy to spell correctly - and creative...
"Maybe XMLSpy is developed in a poorly insulated aircraft hangar in Siberia, and thus is strongly impacted by the price of oil?" Certainly LOL-worthy.
I have lived in Brazil for 11 years and never heard of this company. You can check out their website: http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/
150 is the maximum, not the optimum. It's just a really big safety margin.
I think that this analysis only focuses on one half of the forces that direct survival. Humans may work more efficiently as small groups, but we have also formed into large hierarchical structures for as long as we have had history. Egypt and Summaria were both hierarchically governed. Organizations survive by becoming more efficient, but they also survive by have more labor available. Napoleon would not have won a single battle if his soldiers had fought in groups of 8 to 10.

I think that it depends more on the specifics of the situation and what you are trying to accomplish. Large organizations have advantages that no small organization can match. You gain your freedom at the price of security.
Something about that design and the icons makes me feel vaguely happy. That's a good emotion for an industrial equipment manufacturer to elicit...
I used to work for a defense company that eventually got bought by a mega defense company. It was ~3000 people in various parts of the country and it was started by a man who deeply believed in the power of the entrepreneurial spirit. It had that free for all structure that PG says he'd never seen in a tech company. It was the wild west. We had different groups competing for the same government contracts. Managers and hackers alike got whopping bonuses for beating out other groups and they got to decide which contracts they wanted to bag. Entire groups were fired if they didn't bring in revenue. Fist fights, rancor and IP theft between teams were commonplace. But with all that they created some truly mind expanding tech for their time. They owned every angle of a highly lucrative market and showed no signs of slowing down... Until they got bought. The good news is, the fist fights, duplicate (and sometimes triplicate) efforts were stopped and everyone is one big happy family that hasn't done anything new in 7 years. Their market share is in free fall but they say it's fine b/c they are moving away from products in to large scale integration which is too boring to even type about. All the cowboys have gone to other places and I went to a startup. It was fun while it lasted.
in the notes of this essay there is a strong statement about not funding startups with credit card debt. Just wondering if there is an acceptable limit of cc debt to use to get from concept to prototype? Or if its all the same and just a bad idea. beyong YC and friends & fam, there are limited options for the small pop of cash that gives you the time required to work in your startup. So far at my company we have been very tightly spending on a cc, not incurred a lot of debt but still don't have the small cash cushion to ditch the day job and jump in full time. sorry for the tangent.
To the guy(s) who downvoted me: are you really interested in (IPO) valuation? Are your sell-off plans so finely detailed that you have to sell during a recession?
> The profitable ones can receive more funding, if needed.

Who decides if it's needed?
surely just put some js at the top of the html, to remember the current time, then set some js to be executed onload, and calc the difference?

Or are you not allowed to edit the code? :/
Are you just thinking of names? Or do you do something like making a list of words related to your startup, and then combining them to see what works (and isn't taken)?
If Google had won, it would've been. Why hate on some billion dollar corporations, but not others?
I know it makes perfect sense but it's just not going to get them where they want to go. It's not fair to say that and not back it up, but it would take too long to explain. Suffice it to say that 'small' is right, but not in terms of code, and 'self-describing' doesn't even play a role.
Another appeal of big companies that wasn't touched on in the essay is that 'everybody's doing it'. I would argue that in addition to the economies of scale of mass production a large reason why you see people in corporations, eating crappy foods, and even wearing the same clothes is because 'everybody's doing it'.
How does a recession influence a start-up?
This is why I love the HN community - not one but two people recommend the same book - that's a huge vote of confidence that forced me to take a better look at it.
All in all, not a bad framework, though I expect much tinkering would be needed to optimize it. It’s worth noting that almost every large company strives to be “entrepreneurial”, although some are better at implementing this than others. The world’s largest private company (Koch Industries, I believe) prides itself on “market based management”, though I’m not sure what this means in practice. Koch is also a big funder of libertarian causes, which gives some hint at his mindset.
It's very different if you have a day job, income, etc. I think he's saying "Don't work full time on a startup by living off of credit cards." I have credit cards with limits more than a YC investment, but if I lived off that and the startup failed, instead of starting fresh, I'd have a lot of money+interest to pay back.
I start with names related to the concept but it always seems to morph into names that aren't related. I end up pulling words out of my brain and then break them apart and put them together in different forms. I also use a thesaurus to find other meanings for words...
MyBikeLane - Participatory Law Enforcement
Has anyone else been to a Safari or seen wild life (read: Lions or Cheetahs) in their natural habitat?

If you have, that metaphor of a caged Lion vs. a wild Lion is (almost) all you need to extract out of this essay.
I've done this many times in the past, if on a more private scale (e.g. on the developer mailing list of a particular project). In fact, a few years back, I started work on a website to facilitate this kind of project, though I never launched it (but I do still hold the ransomware.com domain name just in case I decide to come back to it). All of those projects ranged in cost between $500 and $20000, and most eventually turned out good (though I sometimes had to double down and hand the code over to someone else, or work on it myself, to get it polished and ready for production).

In the Open Source world, this kind of thing is not at all rare or unproven. It can work extremely well, and if it's something that works within an existing community of users and developers you get free quality control and vetting of the results...if it's a standalone project, I suspect you'll be doing your own QC. Though I'm sure you wrangle some of your fellow YC'ers into helping bang on it if it's generally useful.

Firefox plugins are a good choice for this kind of model (and I had a Firefox plugin made for about $4k about three years ago, in a very similar process), as they are small, easily testable by a wide audience, and can leverage existing infrastructure for the hard stuff.

The tricky thing, however, which you've noted, is that since only one prize is being offered, you'll have a hard time getting real buy-in from a large number of developers. $3k guaranteed is a great motivator for a student to spend a month working on something. A 1-in-50 chance at $3k is far less of a motivator. So, I've almost always broken it up into a "prove you can and really want to do it" phase and a "OK, now do it" (and the occasions where I didn't I already knew the work of the people offering to work on it from their Open Source contributions--this is tricky if you aren't following their projects reasonably closely). I didn't always phrase it as a "prove you can do it" project...instead I would pick the highest value low effort part of the project and offer a pittance for the first person to solve it--$500 is plenty, if the task is small enough. Then when the best version is delivered, I'd hire them for the rest of the project.

All of this begins to sound more like traditional contract work, rather than a contest, of course. But it does work, and making it a public process does tend to get more community involvement than a "I hired this guy to work on this project and now it's done, let me show you it" situation--if you need to get the project merged into the core project codebase, this separatist practice can make the merger very difficult...personalities get bruised if they think you're absconding with good ideas and dropping in a bunch of code they've never seen or talked about.
Past behavior as a predictor of future behavior implies the winners will not innovate and will not be open. Not all billion dollar corporations are equal.
This made me think of something Peter Drucker wrote, and I think it came from the article summarized here:

http://knowledgeworks.wordpress.com/2007/06/05/article-the-c...

pg says that the modern firm is the product of modern technology, but this summary of Drucker's article points out that technology is also obviating the need for much of the "middle management" layers that pg criticizes as anathema to humankind's natural state.

I'm pretty sure somewhere Drucker also says that the only reason to keep activities within a single firm is because the transaction costs are lower than having activities performed by an outside firm. I think he also argued that as transaction costs between firms fall due to technology, it makes sense to "outsource" more and more, which of course we are seeing in today's economy. Which suggests that we should see more small firms over time.

Too bad Drucker is no longer with us. I'm sure he would have a lot more interesting things to say relevant to startups.
And it'd be nice if sick days/flexible schedules reflected that.
The reason why we started using it was we are required to send out HTML email. This sucks I know, but it wasn't an option. I found that CI's email lib had problems with sending out HTML mail with images as attachments and referencing those images in the HTML. Absolute image urls were not an option either.
How could you bet against an overvalued private company? Are VC funds ever publicly traded?
If nothing else, should offer a big confidence and morale booster to envision yourself as a lion prowling in the wild as you furiously hack away at your startup.
The moral of this story is that I'd rather read your article than the Economist's. :)
Talk about the talkers. I think I remember that being some kind of warning sign.
I usually just test in Konqueror and periodically test on my girlfriend's MacBook. Since Konqueror shares lineage with Safari for HTML+CSS+JavaScript, it at least looks similar most of the time...I think WebKit has actually been merged in recently, so the closeness of the two may get better.

So, it's a problem, but it's not as big a problem as not being able to test quickly and easily on IE. IE is the bitch that never works right...at least Safari's deficiencies are relatively well understood and rarely hateful (they're usually just limitations and not-quite-there standards support, rather than horrifying rendering bugs that conflict dramatically with the standards).
Ruby on Rings?
This one got a double serving of Kool Aid.
Last Christmass I considered giving a gift certificate for "relieving you off some stuff".

Seriously, stuff is piling up too fast - ebay is too inefficient for me, for years I have pondered a kind of "garage sale" web service. Just put up a photo of the pile of junk and make it an image map - buyers can just click on the items on the map. It is too much work to fill out a several page form for every item to sell on ebay.

There, I published an idea...
You can always wager your reputation, or at least make some definitive claims that can be held against you if you end up being wrong.

"Some companies with high valuation will tank" is neither informative nor original advice. It's beating up on an easy target without adding anything new.
That was for crime in general, though. The article here mentioned that the statistics for other crimes were different from burglary.
how about "Gentlemen don't like to buy diamonds at all, but if forced to, they prefer buying them online."

Making women "want and require" diamond rings for weddings is the bigest brainwashing and most successful marketing campaign ever. good job DeBeers.
There is some sound evolutionary reasoning in doing what lots of other people are doing. With the ease of living today and the massive amount of information available, the thinking is anachronistic. Too bad there are so many things that we're hard wired to do.
You should make the comment link visible, but require registration to actually post a comment. You should not hide any features from unregistered users, just require registration before they are used.
the following 2 links should help you - good luck

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-Na...

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html
There are websites that will do it. My state even has a website where you can register with a credit card in about 5 minutes. Doing that first step by yourself is fine. I had my lawyer do it and I found out that all they do is have a paralegal go to the website. However if you have more than one founder you'll want to go to an attorney and work up some sort of agreement among the founders. Right of first refusal to sell their share, what happens to a founder's shares if he prematurely meets his demise, what happens to a founder's shares if he gets divorced, etc. There are a whole bunch of these situations to consider and you need to get the answers in an agreement up front.