skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: What are VCs looking for in a "team"?
I have been reading a lot of VC blogs lately, as I try to get my startup going. A lot of them are looking at the the team and asking if this "team can execute". I want to know what does that mean?

I know VCs are looking for a good team because that's what they are investing in. But does this mean having MBA guys with management experience, or technical guys with CS degrees from top colleges? We are two CS majors from Univ. of MD and Duke University, with about 15 years of combined experience at major consulting firms designing/implementing technical projects. How should we be looking to grow the team to meet VC criteria?

Thanks in advance for the advice!
Users? Trained!?!?!?!? Someone needs to stop hanging out with geeks :)

These domains ARE valuable - both for income generation and resale potential.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-09-domainers_x.htm

http://www.google.com/search?q=domaining
How Startups Can Use PR Successfully
If I'm remembering correctly, relentless, irrational optimism is a personality characteristic that comes out again and again in psychological studies of successful entrepreneurs.

I suppose it's related to persistence.
YouTube removes videos banned in Turkey
"each site will cost him between $1 and $3 million a piece" - are you kidding me? Just to build it out? Wouldn't you build a "test" site first before you invested a million dollars?

p.s. Congrats - to Auctomatic...
Fuck Google for kowtowing to authoritarian regimes.
I'm normally a clean language man, but that is just bitchin'!

gibs, your architecture pieces add some nice variety to HN. Thanks!
You're going to cite a USA Today article as some sort of conclusive proof of your argument?

The "value" is perceived, often by people who have no idea what they're doing (much like the examples in your USA Today article).

This is a lot like the "value" of various antiques, where antique dealers constantly buy and sell pieces amongst themselves. Did you hear the joke about the 3 antique dealers trapped on an island with a single King Louie VIII chair? They all managed to make a living...
>These kind of environments are hard to discover unless you happen upon them and are blown away by the level of talent involved. But YC is most fascinating to me because it's a continuing (although periodic) experiment in creating one of these environments that's freestanding.

YC is fascinating to me because it is a conscious attempt to form these environments. Historically, most of the great learning/building groups seem to have come about by accident.
I think most people would benefit from thinking more like Paul Graham does. However, they would benefit from adopting the worldview and ideas of lots of other people too. The point is to borrow from everybody worth borrowing from. Usually people tend to over-imitate the person that they have borrowed from most recently, but this works itself out. In the long run they will benefit from having a little more Paul Graham in them, not “acting like Paul Grahams”.
Yes, if they benefit from a larger screen and full keyboard. Unless human eyes get much sharper and fingers get smaller in the next 7 years.
Ok, I obviously know that there's a place for niched startups in the ecosystem.

But think about this guy's potential Total Addressable Market. How many videos on YouTube are personal confessionals? Let's estimate one in every two thousand, so 0.05% of their total. Let's assume this guy can double the size of that market through his concentration on the subject. 0.1% of YouTube's realized market value is $1.65 Million.

Sometimes people should just use their head when analyzing a market instead of their heart. Pick a market that has reasonable growth potential. I think a lot of investors get hosed by reasonable entrepreneurs with unreasonable market expectations.
The website says to drop in the office if you're interested in the project. That's exactly what I did. I saw the bug live and met some of the team. This device is impressive and there is a lot more just around the corner from this company.
Microsoft toiled away in obscureness for over half a decade before landing the IBM DOS deal. Having perspective and realistic goals is helpful, there are a lot of good books on this topic (Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure, Founders at Work).

What problem did you try to solve with your startup?
That you can't think of many might imply most that have tried never grew large enough to get your attention.
Though I am a happy user too, we are worried about a huge Black Swan scenario.
Elevator Pitch: Clickpass brings some password relief
>Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We'll have "eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain."

What developed country’s government would allow people to experiment with such things? Risk-aversion is a real brake on the singularity, and it tends to increase with wealth.
Put Facebook on your website
Awesome - we're thrilled to be on there, you've done a text-book perfect install :)

In a true co-incidence, Clickpass is also in the Guardian today:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/03/elevator_...

Sometimes you just get lucky ;)
Depends on the VCs. The better ones are looking for tech whizzes. The ones lower down may still be looking for MBAs. What all want is some sign that you're a very effective person. They look at a combination of resume, recommendations, and their own impressions to decide that.

If you're working in a niche field, VCs may also care whether you have experience in it. But this doesn't matter as much as being smart and effective. If Blake Ross wanted to start a healthcare startup, VCs would fund it.
I always thought a nice system would let me pay by per-second bandwidth rather than by some contrived package combination of monthly cap and top speed.

e.g. $30/100KB/s, $40/250KB/s, etc.
Heh, thinking of exactly that, I was going to write about how turkeys are fed and well taken care of by humans for 99% of their lives, until that last day, when things take a turn for the worse.

That said, things will run just fine, even with downtime, if you're not depending on the machine in any way, don't have any local storage, and are capable of switching over to other systems. However the lack of downtime might lull people into not worrying about that stuff.
Move to your country of origin or other common countries where you & your founders don't need a visa and start a startup from there.

If you move from the US to a country where the currency is weaker, the same dollar will really stretch.

I spoke to the RedSwoosh guys who had moved to Thailand for 6 months and it worked out well for them: http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB119179859820351...
One of the most striking features of the 20th century is that the economy has gotten lighter per unit of wealth. New goods are made of fewer raw materials and more ideas. Greenspan has a famous piece on this, which unfortunately I was not able to google up. I am with Julian Simon on the issue, I doubt that raw material scarcity will be a significant brake on human advancement.
This is news.

But why didn't you just submit the link instead of copying spiel from either a press release or this NY Times page: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/technology/personaltech/27...

I think you should delete this and just submit the link proper.
Our area - a simple one page tool for marking delivery areas, comments appreciated
The problem is we are all from different countries. If I move to the country of my origin, my team-mates will need a visa to move to that country. Of course, its much easier to work from different parts of the world but not sure how advisable that is for a startup when many people need to work face to face.
Less than it would with other people. I get a lot of info about which forums exist from referring urls. That was how I learned about both Delicious and StumbleUpon. So I can at least say with fair certainty that there's no good smaller forum where people link to my stuff. Except here of course.

Metafilter might count as an exception. They often have interestesting links. But reading the comments is like eavesdropping on a bunch of freshmen at Oberlin.

TechMeme is not bad, but I don't think the sites they link to are decided by user votes.
ha... Just b/c they say they "Sold out" doesn't mean they sold a lot. They could have had only 10 units to sell.
I thought the nickname for aerogel given in Michael Flynn's Firestar series was better... Solid Smoke.

(The article in the Times linked to by Wired keeps calling it Frozen Smoke, which just isn't as catchy to me... in case you you were wondering why I was bringing this up.)
You raise an important concern, but I wonder if the analogy is the right one. For a lot of startups/businesses, a period of downtime (in hours, not days) is not death. It might suck, but you won't die. In the late '90s, Ebay was down for three days straight (!) and it's still doing OK.

I will be surprised if Amazon doesn't work out the reliability issues anyway, given the massive resources and smart people it has available to it.
Amazon's pricing compares favorably with slicehost's?
SocialMedia Business School Coming April 3
Why functional programming?
You've got 30 minutes... to write a python script
Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but interesting nevertheless.

This story was submitted to reddit at least two times: the original submission was downmodded to zero (or less), a resubmit eventually to 1. Here, it's at 51 points.

I suppose what I want to say is

127.0.0.1 reddit.com programming.reddit.com
i'm pretty sure that people who vote on reddit can have opinion, and they intersect in some way with people who comment.

there might be more negative comments, but that's actually a natural phenomenon -- comments of agreement looking like "+1" are generally avoided, but comments of disagreement are typically more meaningful becauae comment author can describe _how_ he disagrees. also, you see, comments like "author is great!" are generally considered asslicking, and hence are inpopular.

so, you cannot realiably judge opinion of mass from comments.

but you can do this from vote number.
A bit of downtime is certainly not a catastrophe, but it might turn into one if you lose a bunch of data because you weren't properly shipping it elsewhere.
What Does eBay Do with Craigslist Stake?
Look Out PowerPoint - SlideRocket Rocks
What worms, virus and spam attacks look like in 3-D
Ask YC:  Best Tools, books to learn more about build, deployment process
What are the tools you use for one step build, depolyment ? I am mainly interested in applications written in Python, PHP and Ruby.
Every SEO person I've talked to or read from always says good domains are the foundation for making money online.

Those domains are still quite valuable.
My observation is that an immigration lawyer adds a lot more legitimacy. This suggests the hypothesis that US immigration is, de facto, a two-tier system: those who can afford the right lawyer are on an unofficial fast track. This is a de facto and not a de jure distinction because it would be politically unacceptable.

This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining the system's byzantine complexity, which often seems irrational: it's a membrane. The upper tier of candidates (those with lawyers) are able to penetrate the membrane more readily than the lower tier.
Apple patents iTunes, iPhone/iPod-based fitness system
Great points.

> Consider if you could make perfect clones of yourself, with all of your memories and developments.

> Those clones would act exactly like you, but they still wouldn't be you.

I believe the argument is something along the line of if you replace a neuron with some sort of artificial neuron are you still "you"? How about another 10? How about a handful here and a handful there over the course of a year? What if 10% of your neurons are now artificial along with fake hips and knees and regenerated biological teeth? not to mention the tip of your finger that you accidentally sliced off..
Thank you very much for all your advices.
It's easier to make 100s of units than 10s of units. Unless you're a couple of guys making them manually heh.
This sort of info aggregation/overload will never catch on outside of the early adopter community. It's very value is predicated on having too much data online.
Jakob Nielsen found that only 76% of people who wanted to do a search could actually do so. See http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designer-user-differences.html -- it's quite long so search for "Getting to Google is hard"
Yeah, well a lot of SEO people are just parrots who repeat what they've heard.

Does "Amazon" equate to a massive multi-product marketplace somehow? How about "ebay"? "Flickr" is so much like "photo hosting" that you can see why they're such a popular search result. And so on.

Having key search terms in your domain name lends a tiny bit of weight to the overall result ranking. The link text, page title and H1 tags will do more for you though. So will text in the url itself (www.foo.com/these-are-my-keywords).
RubyForge: Friend Feed API: Project Info
Is it worth co-founding a startup with great funding but a poor team?
I am lucky to have a network of friends that have excellent connections for funding through family and work. Recently they have approached me to co-found a startup catering primarily to legal advisory firms.

They are certainly friends, but are not the most disciplined or experienced business people. They have a primarily legal background, so I don't think they've worked on a software development project before. And their attitude is 'funding first, business plan after,' which immediately sets off a red flag in my mind. Basically, I question their ability to found and grow a company successfully.

They have access to a few hundred thousand dollars (possibly more down the road) in funding and the support of some 'heavy hitting' business people, including the CMO of one of the major airline ticketing sites on the web. (I am going to leave out the name of the company for their own privacy).

My question is: is it worth jumping on to this project for the networking opportunities, the increased pay, and the obvious freedoms from a 9-5, even though I do not necessarily have faith in the idea or people? Who you know is a lot more valuable than what you know, especially as you get higher up in business, and I would love to be able to incorporate the 'heavy hitters' into my network for future advice or funding for a personal project. At the same time, I am horrified of dealing with a group of people who don't know what they're doing for six months, only to realize that the entire project has been a naive waste of time.

As a note, I am pretty happy with my 9-5 job right now ... it is rewarding and I am paid well (although I would ask for much more to join the startup), but there is no chance of me becoming a 'heavy hitter' there in the next three years or so.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.
I think this is a much better argument against it than any of the more common technologically pessimistic ones.
Although it didn't break it down further, the article said that the other 24% of people trying to get to Google "...either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine". So, some of that 24% were able to execute a search, just not on Google. Let's be generous and say 10% used something else (like the MSN search that comes up by default in IE).

My personal non-scientific experience is that users who are so internet-clueless are also e-commerce-phobic... They won't put their credit card and personal data "into the intarweb". So, the value to a retailer of this group of folks that can't master ANY search engine is probably much less than the cost of developing and promoting these sites based on such great domain names.
>Homeopathic medicines usually have very little side effects.

Yes, because they don't do anything. They are based on a false idea that can never work. There is no scientific and clinic evidence to show that it does work. It is ridiculous to even mention it as an alternative.
Are Y Combinator startups less Ambitious?
I want to put a decent entrepreneurial argument. We have seen many Y Combinator startups up till now and I think many had great potential and could have expanded their business and user base to match with the titans.

Why we didn't see next facebook or Digg beaters(in terms of size)? I think only Scribd, Loopt and Reddit have gone so far and they had much more potential to go further considering their business models ... or I am being a jerk? Of course I don't know the complete picture and it's too early to tell this, but I would like you to give a different dimension to this argument and tell us your opinion.
Don't call us domain squatters. We're domain farmers. And you're just jealous. :-)
For me, the biggest step in resolving the reliability issues would be for Amazon to provide load balancing in the API. With a static IP, I could run my own LVS-based load balancer, but I might screw it up. If Amazon provided load balancing, their other customers would help shake out the major bugs, and I'd expect it to work much more reliably.
I loved Kurzweil's book. Unfortunately in all the talk about Moore's Law and exponential growth, Murphy's Law was forgotten (perhaps in a self-referencing manifestation of the same law).

Example:
My HMO has figured out that, if a patient has a serious chronic ailment (e.g., diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.) then it is cheaper for them should the patient die:

I. Treat patient:

cost of treatment $100

cost of future treatments $???

Highly-variable costs borne largely by the HMO.

II. Let patient die:

cost of treatment $100

cost of future treatments $ 0

Cost to HMO limited to $100. Remaining costs borne by the deceased's life insurance company.

The perfect HMO patient is one who never visits his doctor and then dies quickly.

Should the HMO increase profitability by speeding their chronically-ill patients to a painless death? Stockholders cry "Yes!"; patients whimper a fearful "No." Needless to say some cognitive dissonance must arise should one's income be so directly tied to one's ability to (not) keep one's patients alive.

Economic and social conflicts within the medical system are a greater hindrance to the singularity than are technical hurdles.
[Sigh] I didn't feel like digging around for the better articles out there that I've read so I grabbed the one linked to in Wikipedia. Serves me right for being lazy.

Monetization techniques are improving (Auctomatic might be the next step?) but even just with AdSense they still bring in a lot of money. Factor in the minimal effort required to milk them for cash and increasing resale values and they become very attractive investments.
Creating fake Italian names with Markov chains
This is a rather unfounded claim without any data. Seems like a troll post.
Hey, just relax and take a break for a week. Visit your favorite vacation spot and meditate for an hour everyday! This will grant mental strength and will improve your concentration. Look for a place where you can go for a swim and enjoy good food. You need to sleep well and keep yourself physically active. Doing this, I am sure you'll return back to normalcy, and then you can analyze your failure with an open mind and a positive attitude.
Now that's a good point I hadn't thought of! Hmm. OK, now I'm less optimistic about the Auctomatic deal. [that wasn't sarcasm, that was sincere]

I think the Plenty of Fish model (lots of traffic, high priced sponsorship ads and affiliate links to more targeted or efficient sites) is a better bet for high value domain names, given that characteristic that you pointed out about the people unable to find a search engine. They might not know what they're doing, but you can be darn sure they click on ads!
Neat idea. Could be useful for marking property sizes or lots for a housing complex.

There's one big usability problem that I encountered: You start with one marker (showing the address the user entered), but it isn't used in calculating the area at all. It's especially confusing because the initial directions bubble is coming from it, which for me implied that it was the marking the first corner of my shape.

I think you should either not show the address marker, or (since it's draggable) use it in calculating the area. I haven't used the Google Maps api before, so I don't know how possible those suggestions are.

Double clicking markers zoomed the map in and didn't remove them.

On the directions:

I think you should move the last bullet point to a persistent place above the iframe code. It shortens the directions and keeps the information available in case the user forgets or skips them.

You should clarify the "toggle filling" option. I was expecting a color change, not a fill or no fill. In fact, I would drop this option and just default to fill.

So I'd reword the directions as:

* Click the map to create markers.
* Drag markers around to define your area.
* Double click a marker to remove it.

Edit:

Thinking about the fill or no fill thing, I can see how it could help differentiate between an area and a route. But a route doesn't have to connect. Maybe you could add the ability to make routes?

Edit 2:

It doesn't seem like you can specify markers exactly. What's the point of using this instead of marking up a screenshot in Photoshop?
I'll be using the OLPC! (Hopefully, if they deliver to Canada by then :P)
we will use the term AI instead of robot

I use the term "robot" because these things need a physical component, especially if they are going to be manufacturing other physical components that contain themselves. AI is attached to atoms no matter what. Atoms are expensive. As soon as expense is involved, economic scarcity is involved. As soon as scarcity is involved, competition is involved.

the only thing that matters to an AI is how "smart" it is - how efficient its algorithms are and how fast those algorithms run

What is this "algorithm" thing? A newborn baby, I strongly suspect, contains very few algorithms.

If an AI figures out an algorithm that allows for a more efficient thought process, what's to stop the AI from modifying itself to use that algorithm

Nothing. And once you have billions of robots [see above] modifying themselves, duplicating themselves, etc, you are going to start running low on resources. Once one of them learns to...instead of making itself "better" [in our opinion]...make itself competitive, the race to higher intelligence will end, as with humans.
A much more sane response to the overwrought fears of EC2 downtime. If you don't know your hourly/daily income rate (often $0), then you can't even correctly value uptime.
Awesome awesome awesome awesome.

Now for my contribution to the discussion: How does the rotation work at the base of the building? Or is it mounted on top of another non-rotating building?
Exactly, they're only overused as long as they're cheap. We'll find alternatives quickly once the price signals that it's worth it. (The alternative might be a lower standard of living because no alternative can be found, but that's life). And usually, that shift creates an arbitrage opportunity that someone is going to make money off of.

For instance, while many people fear rising gas and oil prices, I'm pretty sure motorcycle manufacturers, bicycle shops, and rental property owners in dense, transit-rich cities are licking their chops. $10/gal gas makes NYC rent more reasonable.
Yeah, certainly this is a troll post. I have been analyzing certain posts on various sites ever since I read that article by Paul. This one certainly doesn't have any base or any analytical data to question Y Combinator startups. This guy surely looks forward to pull unnecessary attention to his post.