skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I need about 7 hours, my girlfriend needs 8-10, so we tend to compromise somewhere in the middle, with me continuing to read for a while after she's fallen asleep. I must not sleep much longer than 8 hours though, or I end up lethargic and unproductive and also unable to fall asleep the next night.

For me, the main sleep-related productivity boosters are making sure I can and do actually sleep, which took me years, (lying awake until 4am+ sucks big time) and making sure I'm ready to work at about 8-8:30 in the morning. 8:30 to 11:30 easily is my most productive time of day, probably 2-3 times as productive as other times.

I wouldn't bother trying to reduce sleep time. Optimise your awake time for happiness and productivity.
I recommend naming your startup "Essentialize", or some variation thereof.
I like to have a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern throughout any name I create. Such names are easy to pronounce and can sometimes have a sing-song sound to it.

I usually think of the idea I am working on and write as many words about it as possible. I then filter/add as needed. After I have a long enough list (and this is where it gets sketchy) I read the words aloud and then set the list aside.

At this point it's worth mentioning that I'm HIGHLY dyslexic and this is where it comes handy: I start mixing the words together in my mind by cutting them up and combining them. This is a process that is very specific to how I might create a name for a project and it might not work for you ;)

Also, I sometimes violate the first rule of the consonant-vowel pattern if I have two words that compliment each other semantically. This can yields the worst results, but it helps filter out what I don't want in a name.

When creating a list of words, I sometimes throw in adjectives that are not related to the concept but evoke a certain feeling/emotion/color. This sometimes helps, sometimes doesn't.
I work crazy hours, but usually still manage to sleep 8 hours or so, minus when I'm really excited and can't sleep at all.
* Use a thesaurus
* Read lots about the problem you're solving. You may find obscure (but cool) academic terms that apply to your space.
* Buy theburdenofdestiny.com from me for a MILLLION DOLLARS

It took us months to think of a domain name we really liked. We thought we'd have to settle for something we hated. But we didn't -- we thought of something, and we love it.
While I agree that it's a good idea to start with some limits, with a business model like this (few customers, mucho $$/customer), it's probably better to let the first few customers dictate what to start out with. Of course the early product can't be everything to everyone, but it can be everything to one client! Then it's a base to build off of, finding the next client with similar needs and adding the diff to the product base. This way, as the diversity of customers grows, the product will grow with the business and open new opportunities.

Having said that, I'm curious to know what you think your first customers will be like (size, industry, etc).
how is that better than .name?
Y Combinator Feedback on Your Site: It hurts so good
via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spot_the_ball_competition

"the "correct answer" is the position of the ball as judged by a panel of experts, rather than the position of the actual ball before it was removed, this is because you cannot gamble on an event that as already happened"

which is the case in this particular competition, you are betting that you and the judge with say the same spot as you guess on the image and not where the actual ball was
Do you have any issues with instances crashing or DNS problems? How long have you been using it? I'm considering going this way also but I'm not very strong with linux admin skillz.
Also Pacific Time. Give it a few hours and see them trickle in ;-)
Domain availability. Think of a two/three word description for what your app is, see if it's available. Go to the thesaurus and look up alternates.

http://instantdomainsearch.com/ roxx
New: featurelist.org for upvoting and managing feature requests for any project.
GMT +1 (France)
Incidentally, this is how all software used to be. When software was an add-on to the millions of dollars of hardware you bought, all the software was custom-written for the purchasing business. Once computers got cheap enough that many, many more businesses could afford them, there was an economy of scale that enabled mass-produced shrink-wrapped software. When the software cost went from hundreds of thousands of dollars down to thousands of dollars, businesses changed their practices to match the packaged software because it was cheaper than writing custom.

I'm not sure what would ignite that change in ERP because I think the number of businesses that need that scale of organization isn't going to increase dramatically, so there won't be economies of scale. I guess a valid question would be - how many companies aren't using an ERP at all that would benefit if one was available at the right price? My computer centric view makes me forget that some people still use paper and pencil, land lines, and write checks.
Check out http://instantdomainsearch.com/

It's a tools that lets you check the availability of domain names on the fly, without reloading pages. They index available domains and then display the results based on what you type in. the result is that you get the availability quickly, but it's not always up to date (as we found out after several "available" names were really taken).

It's still a powerful tool and a great brainstorming help.
Watching TV makes you more of an armchair hacker.

Actually, I'm getting a lot more done since my wife banned me from watching TV with her, because I get irritated by commercials.
I go to thesaurus.com and try mutilating synonyms of what I want to convey. I mash word combos together, along with substituting similar sounding made up syllables. If you tell me what you're working on and want to convey, I'll take a crack at it. I bet others on here will too. Some examples of my creations (I've only paid a squatter once):

Testomatix: test + automation + "ix" added in for high-tech-soundiness and anti-domain-squatter non-obviousness.

RentRocket: I loved the alliteration, and got it cheap.

Wincognito: (privacy software and pop-up blocker for windows back before they were free) win + incognito

Ziptuck:(fashion site) I have a theory that similar known names "prime" the mind to remember other like names. (Osama, Obama, Paris Hilton, Perez Hilton) and that the other associations of the 'original name' disappear quickly, so I went with it.

Edit: Also, I suggest moniker's bulk lookup: http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp
Another music sharing service:

http://www.jukefly.com/
Electronic Health Records: Can Microsoft and Google Help?
I name the project/product based off what it does, like:

remindsyou.com (mine)
routetracker.com
This is a site by the makers of bug.gd (us) as a freebie for the open development community and hackers like those at news.YC.
I'm glad you've brought your site to be picked apart by the News.YC group. Judging by this blog post you're doing exactly what you should be doing: Listening to the suggestions and adapting as needed. Good luck with this!
1.) always do your domain searches on http://www.internic.net/whois.html so you can be sure that they're not being registered as you search for them.

2.) Read http://www.thenameinspector.com from beginning to end

3.) Come up with words that describe your ideas then use thesaurus.com

4.) Look to chop words down by syllables and then combine.
ie. a personal bookmarking service or online profile service that was described as "my highlights" would become mylights.com.
Hehe. lazy Californians (myself included).
Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford
point is they should have let it ride, seeing as the $20mm isn't really going to change their life.
Partly because my co-founder has a strong OpenID background (he wrote the first Drupal 5.0 OpenID module), and partly because we didn't want to create Yet Another Account for people to remember.

We are adding the feature to create a new account (which happens to be an OpenID account, but users don't need to worry about how the backend is done) from within the site, so anyone can register without an existing OpenID account.
Ask YC: How well does your sign up page convert?
What percentage of people who click on your "sign up" or "create an account" button actually fill out and submit the form?

Note that I am NOT asking how many people who come to your site click on the "signup" or "create an account" button (but if you want to answer that question, too, I think it would be interesting)
This company doesn't have a product yet:
smoothstart.com

You can check out their strategy, which is very similar to tony's for getting users before having a product.

Welcome to News.yc, I think you'll gain alot of valuable insight here.
GMT +3, Moscow
It seems like this is a huge opportunity in waiting: a scam-free (or reasonably low-risk) auction site would be welcome by most of ebay's users.
All depends on where they are coming from. I'm getting over $30 cpm from one blog with adsense. Add on other ads and affiliates and I'm a happy camper. If only I had more traffic.
there is not much practical advice in why we nap (which I recommend checking out from a library), but after reading it I realized how little research has been done on irregular sleeping patterns. I tried polyphasic for a while, but life is not setup for it, and you will be tired while trying to make the transitions- it takes an incredible amount of will power.

What I have found though is that you can sleep less at night if you take more naps during the day. Whether everyone can make a full transition to polyphasic is unclear. When I can manage, I sleep less than six hours at night and then take one or two 15 minute naps during the day.

Lucid dreaming is another approach to take to sleep- instead of avoiding sleep trying to be productive while sleeping. (inventor Ray Kurzweil does this)
Well, I don't have to wait; I've been through it. In my case, I had essentially no documentation of what my equity was, just a handshake. And when the company sold, I was treated profoundly well. Did I get lucky? I don't know. I loved the project, loved the work, loved the company, and trusted the founder who hired me.

On the other hand, look at anyone who held private company options in @stake, a well-funded company with a solid 8 figure exit. All of them had their equity positions spelled out on paper, and none of it meant anything, because VC liquidation preferences trump your peon shares.

Look, I'm not trying to be petulant. I just want to point out that your employee options are nowhere nearly as important as you think they are. If you know how to negotiate and you're valuable and you keep your eyes open, you'll do well. If not, no piece of paper is going to save you.

My advice to our friend is, if you love the project, trust the founders, and don't have a much more solid job option, by all means, take the leap.
I'm (sort of) doing it right now. Steve Pavlina's right, it's hard to integrate with the rest of the world (and he was self-employed with older children, and I work for the Man and have babies). I write about it sometimes on my blog - it's less instructive as an ideal case compared to Pavlina, but probably more inline with what a normal person could expect. I've got to say, if there's a lot of inflexible time requirements in life (day job, family, etc), polyphasic sleep is a great way to get some focus time to get in the zone. I've written more blog posts and more code since I restarted in earnest a couple weeks ago than I think I did in the 6 months before that. It really has given me a new sense of freedom to act.

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/category/polyphasi...
You're still incorrect though: http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/how-much-sleep-do-child...
GMT+5.5 Bangalore, India
You're out of your fucking mind if you think this is the major risk of joining a startup.

If you want to see how the "owner" operates the company, ask questions about the sales pipeline. Ask for concrete answers about what happens when the "big customer" cuts them out of the budget.

If you don't know how the company's cash flows work, and you're reading tea leaves about the founders state of mind from meaningless equity numbers, then you're just wanking.
I agree overall, although Moniker's batch lookup is much faster, IMHO.

http://www.moniker.com/domains/batch_reg.jsp
GMT+2
No. Now I read Hacker News.
The first week is a $#%^$#^@$%@@#$% pain. The trick is to train yourself to fall asleep quickly (5-10 min). This takes tinkering (link below). Now, especially if I'm in one of my three comfort places (bed, couch, or car), I know can fall asleep in 5 minutes or so.

Another key is DON'T try to sleep for more than 30 minutes. The deeper you fall asleep, the harder it is to get up. If I snooze my alarm even once for 10 minutes, I'm probably going to be too asleep to bother getting up when that 10 minutes is over.

The good news is that my experience (Steve Pavlina echoes this) is that once you train your body to work on the schedule, then even if you revert to a normal schedule, you can switch back to polyphasic sleep without having to go through the painful first week again. Right now I sleep polyphasic 5-6 days a week and have 1-2 days a week where circumstances prevent me from napping during the day and I then take a full night's sleep at night. Interestingly, I feel terrible after the full night sleep but pretty darn alert during polyphasic sleep.

Here are some of my experiences:

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/category/polyphasi...

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/sleeping-in-your-c...

http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/what-happens-when-...
No. Even with an options plan, and especially but not necessarily if they've taken VC, our friend can get screwed in the event of a takeover.

But that's not what's going to happen. What's really going to happen is, it's going to take more than 4 years for the company to approach any kind of liquidity (really, what's going to happen is, the company is going to go out of business like most software startups, but never mind that). But our friend is going to get bored and leave before 4 years are up.

Are you seriously suggesting that 3 years from now, when he leaves to take a $200,000 job, that he buy private company options? Because if he doesn't, option plan or no, he gets nothing.
it was all web designer input and there was none regarding the actual concept, business model or use of the application

That's not because the users of this site are web designers. Mostly they're developers. It was because the design of the site was so bad that most visitors got held up there. This also explains the low sign-up rate, which you explain as a property of the audience. I think it is more likely a property of the site.
An acronym of a common accounting equation.
This is a common question, and I'm not sure there's a "golden number" for how well any page ought to convert; it depends a lot on where the traffic is coming from. One of your best tools in improving your page, however, is to test multiple versions at once and see which one converts better.

Moreover, anything you can do to reduce the number of steps and requirements for the user will also improve conversion. For example, does your product really need them to confirm their password if they can have it emailed to them when they sign up or at any future time? Try removing unnecessary form fields, or deferring them until after the user has signed up.

For reference, my most recent site (still in development) has the sign-up form on the front page, and we're able to convert 10-15% of random visitors from AdWords. I feel like that's pretty good. On another site, I struggled to get 8-10% overall conversion. And, on a very simple project (http://file.io) that received a good number of hits from del.icio.us/popular (very targeted/interested traffic), I was converting greater than 25%.

Just keep making it simpler, and keep testing, and you can improve your page.
Next time when you ask for feedback for a site that requires registration, please provide a few demo logins we can play with.
How Google's logo came to be
10%

1% of which seems to just like to send in fake emails
Yes, I did mention exactly that in the post "Granted, the blame is mostly ours, due to a less than attractive design and muddy benefit message, maybe most could not see past that to get to the business proposition."
I agree. Based on this posting I went to look at the site and it's clear that this is not ready to be public. It needs a private beta with some really critical thinking going on.

Also, the main page has an it's/its mistake on it which makes it look unready.

It's not surprising that the benefit didn't pop out.
So, the judges don't know where it was originally? They have to guess as well, and that becomes the correct answer? That seems like a terrible way to judge the competition.
when i was wee lad i worked as a beantrees barista and shift manager at yahoo. prior to the move up north to sunnyvale, the cafes were located in the cafeteria/break room of each building and we also managed the multiple coffee stations on every floor.

we went through at least 20 gallons of milk each day per station and served quite a lot of lattes. the indian engineers loved the oregon chai tea, which was actually quite expensive compared to the espresso. at the end of the week we would report total costs and yahoo would just pay the bills, i think it was close to 100,000 a month.

most of us just took home extras, whip cream or coffee or milk.
"We want the open environment and high ceilings and cement floors," he says.

This quote is way more revealing than he intended. As if that were the active ingredient...
On my yet-to-be-launched site, I only have 4 form fields on the signup page:

Login name
Password
Repeat Password
Email

I think anything more (ex: name, age, address) is too much for most sites... Lots of people will enter fake information anyway, or they'll outright turn their backs. It doesn't even help against multiple account creation on sites that forbid it. The best way not to get sensitive information stolen is not to have it in the first place...
We knew the site would involve reading what's new online, so I would spend classtime thinking about domains involving something like "read." It was also during this classtime that I first doodled the alien in the corner of a notebook.

I was in my beloved Alderman library when "reddit" came to mind, as in "I reddit on reddit" (although this slogan was courtesy of PG). I'd also registered reditt because I couldn't decide which one was better. Granted, I was worried about how poorly it was spelled, but it seemed easy enough to remember.

For a time, it was just added to a long list of potential names. We spent the first month of YC without a confirmed name, but I always stuck with reddit despite being repeatedly told how terrible a name it was :-)

Finally Steve acquiesced and we went with reddit. This was after wasting a solid 2 entire days just hunting for domains -- not a great use of time, I must say.

It was also before instantdomainsearch.com, which I highly recommend.
mmmm correct, I'm sure Y! encourages social participation and a well caffeinated workforce.
Seeing Around Corners
I have gained more within the last 2 days than I could have imagined!! Thanks for the insight.
bootstrapping, in part because i have mad faith that participatory ownership can extend even to customers

http://www.fastcompany.com/node/27333/print
Our name was based on established (oldish media) competitors and a requirement to have the main search word/term in the URL (not for SEO but rather to avoid the confusion most 2.0 startup names incur)

http://www.OtherWeather.com
We are now into our second month with the service still running the same lisp process (which we've updated countless times with the REPL). So far - 0 problems. We have in place contingencies for going down by having realtime backup of our data so that if an instance were to crash, we could boot up another within a few minutes with no data loss. In that case, we would email our customers with the direct ip address to login until the dns updates. But I'm guessing this will be a very rare event. So the worst case we are envisioning is about 5 minutes of downtime for our customer in a crash, unless all of Amazon goes down which I don't think has ever happened?

Given Amazon's extensive data center experience with their own products, I have a lot more trust that their service will stay up vs. a smaller hosting company. And the worst case with them is minutes vs. hours or days with smaller providers. (How many famous sites going down with smaller hosts have hit the news in the last 6 months...)

For Ubuntu, we're using:

Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy AMI built using code customized by
Eric Hammond <ehammond@thinksome.com>
For more information:
http://ec2gutsy.notlong.com

If you go for it, I recommend having someone who has a reasonable knowledge of linux avaialable for asking questions or helping you directly, at least to set it up. My linux experience was 0 when we started. Now I can get done what I need to do - but my cofounder is the expert here and guided me on the commands I needed to work with the system. We also set up ssh session that would directly get us in the cloud and then connect to the lisp instance in real time with the REPL through emacs, etc.

We basically had a local box in our office all set up first, and then when our internet connectivity in the office was insufficient, we put it on the cloud. But since it is easy to play around with EC2 and start and stop instances, its probably just as easy to experiment on the cloud as you get things set up.
Half Of All Clicks On Display Ads Are Worthless
'Programs and tatoos, where brevity hurts less.'
"Are organizational differences in common areas like inventory control and accounting actually adding any value?"

Absolutely! That's the entire basis for my business. If there was anything remotely close to what my customers have been asking for, I'd be out selling it.

"In most cases I think they could be standardized without any long-term loss."

That's why you and I hack and our customers run businesses. It took me a long time to learn it, but now I listen to what they say, not what I think.
Startup idea: Convince celebrities (A,B,C-list) to twitter (Significant privacy issues aside)
Streamline your forms with widgets
Distributed version control?  How winter 2007 of you.  Let's try distributed bug tracking.
If it benefits the user to enter real information (or plausible) then you won't have problems with bogus data. Example; social network. If however the email is only the key into the site, expect a lot of temp emails (with confirmation) and bogus (without).

If the service is free I've seen as much as 25%, lowest being maybe 8%. If it's paid you hope for 1% and dream of 3-5%.
"Out of 350 or so visitors, we got 4 sign ups"

The ycnews crowd may not be your target audience. Perhaps they they are too busy hacking their own stuff to bother researching other startups :)
1000 Layoffs Across Yahoo
You're totally right. None of the comments on the TechCrunch thread were without utility.