skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From what I understand, VC's and Angels in tech startups don't use business plans. They use a 10-15 slide PowerPoint deck, and the elevator pitch, or a 15-30 second pitch.

If you're building a web product, and you're in a tech hub like the Valley, Boston, NYC, Austin, etc... I wouldn't bother with a business plan. If you're not in a tech center, I'd bet you're going to have a hard time raising funding with or without a business plan, but YMMV.

If you're gung ho on a business plan, the "Business Plans for Dummies" is a decent start. SCORE: http://www.score.org/index.html offices usually have a lot of good resources on business plans, bus. plan writing software you can use, etc... They would probably have someone who would be willing to look the plan over and critique it for you. And, I know it was mentioned elsewhere, but the Small Business Administration has a lot of resources for small businesses: http://www.sba.gov/ You also might want to try your local chamber of commerce as well. If you're in a smaller/mid-size city, business people are probably going to be your sources of funding, so you might as well go where they are and start networking. You could make your business plan and ask for a critique from a couple of them and see if it gets you anywhere.
Is it just me, or do they seem to be trying to do what AskJeeves tried to do back in the day?
Have you looked at YouTube's API:

http://www.youtube.com/dev
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/overview.html
There are a few good brief articles up on Guy Kawasaki's VC firm's site (Garage Technology Ventures). The most memorable points from the articles were:

1. The purpose of a business plan / pitch is to sell your company to an investor, not just describe it. (This is a pretty self-evident point, but it's helpful to hear from my perspective as a hacker who's usually very interested in how things work, and sometimes needs to take a step back to think about those kinds of issues.)

2. Don't try to fool an investor - they see hundreds of business plans a year, and already know all the tricks out there. Just be honest and rely on the merits of your product / team / strategy. If you have a good idea and a plausible way for it to be successful, you've already got all you need. (Another simple idea, but it's nice to hear from an investor that honesty is appreciated, and that a hacker with good communication skills has a chance against a smooth-talking MBA.)

http://www.garage.com/resources/index.shtml
I know a couple of guys who worked on a trip tracking app for Blackberry. They collected GPS readings out of RIM devices and displayed them on web pages so you could easily tag your trips etc. They supported Blackberry and from what I heard from one of their dev's, it was a huge pain. The toolchain was just plain crappy. Lots of convoluted API calls, lots of incompatibilities between different versions of firmware and lots of weird bugs that were sometimes traced back to the libraries themselves. RIM also decided to create their own markup for "widgets" and they completely ignored web standards. It was all highly complex, convoluted and proprietary. RIM was also providing zero help in distribution and marketing. The startup eventually failed and the whole experience left a bitter taste in everyone's mouths.

If this is an indication of the current RIM developer ecosystem, I would bet much that they'll be able to change the environment in the next 6 months.

After playing with Apple's iPhone SDK, I can see why everyone's so excited. It's extremely dev friendly and a lot more fun to use (also, you avoid Java). The app store is huge and will make marketing and distribution of apps so much easier.
Google flailed around for a long time before finding a route to profitability. Before adwords, they didn't offer anything new in terms of revenue, either.

I'm not saying that it's a given that facebook will find a profitable business model...but with their user base, it's a much better bet than for most other sites.

(That said, $15Bn does seem a bit nuts.)
not any other site. Google can target better than anyone because they know what you are looking for and can provide advertisements for that thing. If I'm trying to find a track bike, and if I search google for track bikes, I get ads for places that sell track bike.

However, If I have in my profile that I ride bikes, bike companies can target me very specifically. Or if I say what bands I like and have listed where I live or go to school, advertisements for concerts for those bands (or bands I might like) can come up. Obviously a lot of sites online can do similar target style advertising, but IMO not as targeted as what facebook can pull of. And they can go horizontally with the company types that advertise, as profiles on facebook are very general. I can put a lot of my info up - for facebook, the more the better. Most sites don't have this broad ability. They are much more niche oriented.
Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server
the question I have it how much of the new server farms are to accommodate growth and how much of it is them just struggling to have the current setup be resilient to the normal usage patterns that they see?
>However, If I have in my profile that I ride bikes, bike companies can target me very specifically.

Sure, but does you having that item in your profile tell me, as an advertiser, anything about your intent to buy a bike? Buy it today? Are you buying it in the next two weeks while I have the money to run a campaign? The answer is of course a big no. Just knowing something about someone doesn't tell you about their current intent. Now, would showing someone like that bike ads over the course of a year help him decide on the make and model of the next bike he purchases? Probably it would. But that's a very expensive proposition and not very profitable. This is why Facebook has such low CPMs.

Now, suppose I had a way of saying "I'm looking to buy a bike"... a person like that would be much more valuable to an advertiser than someone who already rides bikes and has preferences set already for the type of bike/model that she likes. A customer that is new to bikes is A LOT easier to persuade to try out your brand than someone who's been riding bikes for years.

In the end, Google's intent-based advertising is so much more amazing since it caters to everyone's whims so perfectly and displays things to you that you really might want to buy and buy it now.
I've been using SpiderOak (http://spideroak.com) to backup my code daily. Upload to their server. Nice simple gui interface. And it's free for < 2GB. And it works for Linux (unlike DropBox ;)
When I was getting started, I would often obsess over the "right" formats for different types of communication with clients.

Ultimately, I decided what clients really want is to know you are doing everything reasonably possible to take care of them, being courteous, keeping them informed, yet not drowning them in detail.

So, the simplest format that covers these points is a good start. You can then ask for feedback.
The title is a bit aggressive. It's likely that Facebook it couldn't sell stock at last fall's $15 billion valuation. Rather than do a "down round" of financing -- a round with a lower valuation -- they likely found it easier or cheaper to use debt.
The value of Powerset is not consumer facing.

Powerset could make a killing licensing it's search to large businesses who are swimming in data, especially pre-digital data. Applying a natural language program to these archives can associate relevant information and tie it to other piles of data. There's real (non ad-supported!) growth potential for Powerset as a B2B.
Seconded.

On a): More than a little. Plan to be "90% done" by halfway through the schedule. Remember that "the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time". This is entirely true, and its due to unknowns. When this 90% at halfway approach becomes instinct, you will miss very few deadlines. This has become my internal Golden Rule for non-trivial projects.

On b): My business would never have launched if I didn't constantly stretch my skillset past what I thought I could do. But there is still a limit.

On c): Clients never like unexpected surprises. But they hate them even more if they appear late in the game. Keep expectations in line with reality.
Break each part of a project down to what you can do in one sitting. If any item on your list is longer than 8 hrs, you're probably going to miss it. Also, figure out how many of THOSE thing you can do in a week (unlikely to get 40 billable hours / week for me)

As a general rule, if I'm unsure of exactly how long something will take, I double it, and I'm usually very close, or over the high end. (I'm down currently to only adding 40% more time per each unsure item, which has been very close lately..not that I'm getting faster, I'm just getting better at estimating)

Plan time to make their edits (10-20% or more of the project, depending on the quality and robustness of the original spec).

Don't take on a project with a hard deadline you can't meet, you will make yourself crazy.
How to Lose Readers
Setting client expectations is really the core of project management. Everything else helps with the first part.

- Have a plan and share it, including progress updates (so they know when to expect things).

- Have an agreed statement of work (so they know what to expect).

- Think about your risks, write them down and agree them with the customer (so they know in advance that things can go wrong, and can be ready for the consequences).

- Bring up issues early, as with all the information above they will be able to make trade offs. They might be more interested in an early build with less functionality, for example.

This is just as important on a fixed price contract - although the customer doesn't carry the financial risk, they do carry a reputation risk. Every time you are late without sufficient warning they have to go to their organization/co-workers/clients and suffer the consequences of your delay. That's much easier to do a month in advance than a day in advance of a deadline.
after being familiar with Jungian psychometrics, a lot of these things seem off. for example, there are personality types that are easily distracted (eg ENFJ), and there are types that are impossible to distract (eg INTJ)

that's beside the point of the article, but often reading these things is like watching someone trying to do arithmetic with roman numerals instead of the much more arithmetic-friendly arabic notation
I have also written 3 blog posts about command line kung fu:

Bash's Vi Command Line Editing Mode:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-vi-editing-mode-cheat-shee...

Bash's Emacs Editing Mode:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/bash-emacs-editing-mode-cheat-s...

The Definitive Guide to Bash Command Line History:

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-bash-co...

All three articles come with a downloadable cheat sheets (pdf and txt).
wow, should've guessed no big lebowski fans... when the guy is talking about what makes man, and lebowski says that.

sorry the internet is serious business.
Right. Debt financing is a much more common strategy for start-ups now. Sometimes the difference between a huge round of funding and a lesser one is just timing, and debt financing is a good way to give a buffer to time things perfectly.

In Facebook's case, who knows. It does suck to burn equity to buy servers. If Facebook is going to persist and continue to grow, paying off this loan shouldn't be difficult for them.
Pro-choice Programmer
I think it's sad that there are Powerset haters here, of all places. Especially from someone like you, Paul.

I can deal with the company I work for being slammed on techcrunch, because that's what techcrunch is for. But to see the people on news.ycomb start jumping on that bandwagon makes me sad. This is supposed to be the place where startups are explored and taken seriously.

Powerset is not a micro-social site with some added value like some of my previous projects. Making a new search engine is a massive undertaking. It took google several years, but no one seems to want to give any challengers a real chance.
In the Startup Junkies series on iTunes, EarthClassMail borrowed the money to buy servers from a special bank made up of former venture capitalists who specialize in loaning money strictly for the purchase of physical hardware, also used as collateral. If Facebook already has almost half a billion dollars in investments, and feels this expansion will make them money, then they could pay off the loan without having to lower their valuation.
How about ted.com?
Gah! Infinite recursion.
Women Entrepreneurs Pitch Their Companies at Stanford
Powerset deals with Spam the way every other search engine deals with spam. It's not like wikipedia is free of false information (every snapshot is a unique snowflake with some entertainingly wrong things, like that ReiserFS-kills-wife-chart).

Sometimes people have difficulty separating NLP from AI from an Arbiter of Truth. NLP is just understanding semantic information, it's not arbitrating truth/correctness (a.k.a 'you can't squeeze blood from a stone'-principle) nor is it some kind of HAL9000 that can take queries like, "9 people who have been CEOs and who have Christian names" and make sense of them.

In this regard of correctness/spam, Powerset and Google are in an equal starting position. If you search for "cures for cancer" or "causes of autism" on google you get some pretty factually incorrect results in the top 4.

In the case of Spam, check out what Google is forced to do with "hot-button" spam searches, like "Mesolithioma". Where did your standard search page go? :)

Hopefully when powerset has a public product people can play with it and see that really, what we're doing is an evolutionary step forward from keyword search, not some kind of boil-the-oceans-and-google-was-always-wrong-anyways approach.
Wouldn't that be the worst time to sell? Wouldn't you be able to negotiate a higher price with a product with demonstrable value?
Add news.yc to that list.
There's a difference between "mandatory indentation" (good!) and what Python does. I wrote a rant on this subject: http://www.hackerdashery.com/2006/09/close-block-delimiter-s...
Both RIM and Palm (or PalmOS, AccessOS, Palm again, Garnet OS, or whatever their OS is now--Windows Mobile?) must think the complete definition of developer support is to enable third party access. The iPhone does so much more, with a Store, an SDK, a UI builder, and developer videos.

I've had three Palm devices, and the iPhone is a huge leap forward. The only thing Palm did 2005-2007 is announce a revolutionary new operating system that is the same as it was, doubling the onboard memory and camera resolution, and adding new color options is Palm's idea. As lame as that was, changes have been even less noticeable since 2006.
I'll grant that. But whether or not someone prefers the computer or the appliance depends on the software they choose.
I think this is one of the best points for Python as a teaching language. It's not just approachable, it's also practical. I think most of the positive points mentioned here also apply to Ruby.
I work on DoD projects with varying project reporting requirements. There are many methodologies and processes one can follow. I've experiences success with Capability Maturity Model Integration and Agile (others here have mentioned agile too). There's an ongoing "meeting of the minds" of merging CMMI with Agile in the defense space.

For estimation, learning a bit of earned value management system (EVMS) can be useful. There is COCOMO II for estimation, but I don't think you need to go there for small projects.

A book I've found useful is "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art" by Steve McConnell. Its helped me.

The secret sauce is to find that knife's edge balance of infrastructure (accountability and management) versus flexible productivity.

Then there is always the Scotty Principle.
Search could still be orders of magnitude better, and google seems worse and worse lately.

Console yourself with the thought that if PowerSet fixes this problem, you'll see a lot of haters become fanboys. Bear in mind, though, that the pre-bluster has historically been correlated with failure, not success, so people are skeptical. I've read about techniques that will cure cancer so many times.
Tinydb: store some tiny data in a tiny url
I've had good results backing up to S3 with Brackup: http://search.cpan.org/~bradfitz/Brackup/

It optionally encrypts data, though. I don't do that, because encrypting backups seems like playing with fire to me. What if you lose the private key? Now you have two problems.
PHP Has No Culture of Testing
These appliances are connected devices, which means that all they need to be are small wireless dumb terminals. Increases in bandwidth and improvements in distributed computing (cloud computing to be buzzword compliant) will make this even more so.
Founders Fund is known for letting founders cash out, so that could be another option.

Powerset has many employees. If the deal goes through it'd be interesting to see if MSFT gets them all to move.

Either way I wish those guys luck. Their founder Barney Pell seems like a cool guy.
That logic may be true about bikes.

But what if my Facebook profile says I like the movies Godzilla, Jurassic Park, and The Bourne Identity? It's very easy to extrapolate a common movie "typeness" that someone likes from a list. Then you can target new movies in that genre very specifically to users who would be most likely to watch them.

For movies, books, tv shows, etc, and repeatable purchases, the cache of information at Facebook is far, far more valuable than two words at Google.
Ruby requires you to understand OO to understand the language. While every CS student eventually needs to understand OO, it's not something I would want to explain in the first lecture.

For that reason, I agree with the article that Python (or Scheme) is a good starting language. You can start with nothing, and add concepts until you understand the whole language. You don't need to know programming before you can understand "hello world".

(Amusingly, I don't really like Python or Scheme, but I do like Perl and CL. I'm not sure what that says about my personality, but I'm sure it's something :)
http://www.paulgraham.com/vwplan.html

We used that as a model when we wrote our first business plan.
that's actually my opinion. i like the punctuation of closing symbols. my brain doesn't have to think about anything, it just sees "end" and that's that
new business model: capitalize on popular news stories by claiming to be related to the people involved and then setting up fake donation sites.

being an asshole is mandatory.
I'm sure there is some substitution between the categories, but I guess I still think of them as pretty separate.

Pesonally, I have a phone that runs both ssh and vi (a Samsung i760 Windows Mobile 6 phone with a touchscreen and slideout keyboard), and I'm still interested in getting an Eee.
0. Don't accept someone else's definition of what you ought to be.

(Fixed that for you.)
Ask HN: Which mobile platform is your favorite?
It seems the war is picking up momentum between Apple IPhone($100m VC fund), RIM Blackberry($150m VC fund) and Google Android ($10m cash prize pool) to attract mobile developers to their platforms. With that much activity Microsoft and Nokia can not be far behind, so we have a potential 5-side rumble!

Much in this battle is up to enterprising hackers - which platform would you pick and why? Which one is joy to program, which one is the pain in the neck?

It would also be fun to come back to this thread in two years and revisit our sentiments.
"For movies, books, tv shows, etc, and repeatable purchases, the cache of information at Facebook is far, far more valuable than two words at Google."

That data is valuable, but not more valuable than Google's data. It's not just two words. Google knows every movie you've searched for since the last time you cleared your cookies. Assuming Google links the cookie from AdSense with your general Google cookie, they know what sites you visit. They know tons of things about you, and that data is similar in value in isolation to Facebook's data. When you combine that data with intent, which you know from a given search query, you can display more valuable ads than Facebook could ever hope to.

If Facebook Chat gets traction and Facebook pushes its messaging as more of an email replacement, they'll have useful data they can use to determine intent, which they can use to better target ads and get more money per click.
I don't know if Silicon Valley Bank is made up of former VCs, but they will lend to startups.

If you have real assets to back the loan (here, the physical servers they are buying), debt is a far better way to get money than equity. Sure, Facebook _could_ issue stock, but investors would expect a 20%+ return. Instead, Facebook issues some IOUs to a bank that expects a 10% return. The current investors don't get diluted and everyone goes home happy.

Buying physical assets with equity usually unnecessarily dilutive. Save your stockholders; issue debt instead.
This is shady.
I like iPhone now through next summer, an iPhone/Android 60/40 split afterward over the following year, by which time (two years from now) RIM should be in trouble, possibly even worse than Microsoft, who knows how to make software, hardware, and SDKs, and might release a great business phone with 3G, WIFI, and a great keyboard by then (that of course uses Exchange ActiveSync instead of the required $60-100/mo per phone Blackberry connection plan that RIM requires.)
I'm still skeptical that anything will make a dent in RIM's core base. They might shut it out in the consumer market, but not business. iPhones are clearly never going to, unless they offer a model with a dedicated keypad and multiple carriers. Android, we'll see about, but I suspect the Blackberry brand name is one of the most valuable around and will withstand a lot.
But the real reason you don't often see emerging private companies take on big debt-loads is that borrowing money is riskier than selling stock, and it also subordinates the existing equity holders.

I can't get my head around this sentence. I remember Henry Ford bought out all his original investors (when Ford Motor was "emerging") because he didn't want to lose control. (And the family still hasn't). Creditors only have power when you're in bankrupcy court. Shareholders have power until judgement day.

EDIT: Holy beans! When you buy one dollar of Ford Motor stock, you are buying 10 dollars of Ford Motor debt:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=F

Market Cap (intraday)5:	16.20B
Total Debt (mrq):	168.53B