skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The event was awesome as usual! Ran out of pizza pretty quickly but it happens... I personally don't know anybody who had pizza. Rule of thumb is generally 2-3 slices per person.
Reese didn't just sell an idea on its own. He's a master networker (he's always on the phone) and typically he does provisional patents, copyrights, and so on...

like mix max says he's "worked in the basement for years": his reputation and relationships took many years to build, and typically he sells legal licensing to use his ideas...; this is beyond "just an idea"
There's always the typical examples: myspace with a hardcore spamming operation, facebook with beacon and some minor spamming/data theft in the beginning, youtube - pirated content. Ebaum's world - totally stolen content.

Those are obviously the biggest, most well known. Beneath the surface, a ton of companies are doing similar things, at a lesser level, but it often goes unseen. Many cams and dating sites started out spamming and fake profiles/female profiles. Most startups that require a "network effect" often create a lot of fake users at the start.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary."
30+ Free Online Books
You might enjoy it ...
I got my MBA from this programme www.mbaip.com

The thing is it was fun, we had amazing instructors professors, like Pierre-Louis Dubois and Michel Kalika
These are your definitions of sin. Tobacco companies have been bad in the past for lying to their users. However, you could argue that many of these companies are being good to their users.
Do you have any links or even just names of source material? I'm curious.
Personally, we don't view them as evil (or ourselves as good, for that matter). We have had good experiences ordering from Digi-Key as well. They have a lot of parts in stock and they ship things right away so we don't have any qualms with their service.

I think that what frustrates Paul is that Digi-Key is actively trying to block innovation in part search because they don't want price competition. Part search today is like travel search in 1995. I used to go straight to American Airlines to buy tickets and that was fine but how much nicer is it to buy tickets online now? I even travel more because it is easier to find things.

The only thing that Octopart is trying to do is make it easier for people to find parts and Digi-Key has said that they don't want that to happen. They have specifically told us that they don't want us to exist because they don't want price comparison. We keep Digi-Key on the site because it makes our users happy. You'll have to ask Digi-Key how getting rid of Octopart helps their users.
I recommend ALL of them. Seriously.

You could skip certain ones if you're not interested in the topic, but i enjoyed each one.
That ain't a picture of DHH you're seeing there.
wonder why he does that..... cl doesnt make money off page impressions.... seems like closing the system is just hurting himself
Why would you go to all that effort if they don't want to play with you in the first place? If they really wanted to block you, they'll do it through their lawyers.
>Most people don't want to get a huge ass and well muscled but still protruding gut.

You're not going to get huge overnight. It just doesn't happen and isn't something that anyone should even be remotely concerned with.
As I mentioned in the TC comments, in the context of that list, ‘top’ means most frequently quoted on TechMeme. At NewsCred (my startup), we’re collecting metrics so that we can determine lists of the top news sources as well as top journalists (both mainstream/bloggers), but using credibility as our criterion. We want to highlight writers and sources based on quality, rather than popularity or frequency of posts.

We just launched our Alpha, so the dataset is very limited, but in terms of sources, the Economist and Techcrunch (go figure!) came out on top this week.

Also, the lists will be syndicated each week of course!
In addition to listing parts from Digi-Key and Mouser we've also started indexing more consumer oriented sites like Newegg. Where there is overlap between Digi-Key and Newegg, we've found that the distributors are 10%-100% more expensive. For example, here are some search results for power strips (http://octopart.com/category--Accessories--Surge+Protectors/...).

I agree with your point about prices. Most people using Octopart, Digi-Key and Mouser aren't too concerned with pricing. Life would actually be easier for us if we hid Digi-Key's prices but we don't because we want to display all the information we have and because some of our users do find it useful.
I admit that I haven't really explored this vein of thought, but what are the reasons that "good" startups (in the sense of good used in this essay) don't usually make their apps open-source?
Income tax on stock for original founders?
A scenario:

Person launches startup, takes seed funding from angel investor at creation of company. Angel owns 60% for their capital contribution, Founder owns 40% solely for their future sweat contribution, no cash upfront.

Yes or No: The IRS sees the 40% ownership of the new company for the Founder as taxable income because the units are being given to the founder as payment for services being rendered...?

If Yes (which is what my advisors are telling me) — how do people deal with this tax liability? Do most founders put themselves (if their angel doesn't care one way or another) on a vesting schedule just to help spread out the tax burden over a few years?

Or is there some strategy of legal avoidance that I'm unaware of?
Discovery Channel is my current favorite. You could write a book on how right their "The world is just awesome" campaign is. You can see it here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=e5Q0CLlFFm0
This is exactly what I was thinking today. I've spent the last couple of weeks implementing TLS (This is the second time I've had to do this now, it's endless fun) and this time I'm sort of "cheating", because the platform I'm writing for already has high quality ASN.1, crypto and X.509 libraries and enough of PKCS#1 that I scarely have to lift a finger.

Web programming is horrifically dull scut work to my mind, I'd far sooner be writing the heavy lifting in the back end.
I remember Steve Jobs in his speech at Stanford saying that he dropped out because he didn't see the value in it. That amused me :)

I can't say whether an MBA is worth it since I don't have one, but I can say that in my experience it's not necessary. Action is necessary. You can learn by jumping in and doing something. Some people may need teachers and curriculum for motivation/guidance, but you can find that in lots of other places as well. Networking happens after school too, but can take a bit more effort initially.

The back story in my case is I left home at 18 and moved to a new town. I was one credit shy of my high school diploma too, so technically I'm a drop-out. I lucked out and got a job as a designer/coder, and kept learning over time on the job. I did try a university course for programming, but I dropped it after a month because it sucked. I ended up starting my own software company shortly after (turned 7 this year!). I did make some good contacts in my month at school, even hired the program director as my sales guy for about 4-5 years :) I've been working on various startups since, learned a lot, and I'm launching my latest in a month or so.

So in my experience, nothing stops you from starting a business except yourself. If you're willing to learn by doing, which naturally you learn a lot on the job anyway, then I say screw the formal edu and dive right in!
A package tour for a bunch of nerds to stay in the tenderloin and commute to Oracle during the day? I don't foresee many important deals being made during this trip.

On a certain level, this is a bit disturbing, as I distinctly remember the number of silly conferences and mixers increasing to a critical mass right before the dot-com bust. Lately, in SF there has been a Web 2.0/TechCrunch/Valleywag event every other night.
Holographic storage ships next month
This is the guy I was referring to in that "other" thread. His name is Stephen Key. I would've linked to this before, but couldn't remember where I'd read about him or what his name was.

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/26/a-beginners-...

-----

"Stephen is somewhat famous in inventing circles for two reasons. First, he consistently earns millions of dollars licensing his ideas to companies like Disney, Nestle, and Coca-Cola. Second, he is fast. It seldom takes him more than three weeks to go from idea to a signed deal.

"He is not high-tech. There are no multi-year product development cycles. He specializes is creating simple products or improving upon existing products, often using nothing more than a single-sided drawing or photograph. Coupled with refined cold-calling skills, Stephen meets with some of the most influential marketing executives in the world. In this interview, we’ll explore how this advisor to American Inventor rents his ideas to Fortune 500 companies."

-----

In the "other" thread, of course, I wasn't talking about ideas having value insofar as one could simply sell them. Good startup ideas are sort of like treasure maps. A really, really good idea is like a map that shows you where an incredible fortune is and has a high probability of not being a fake, but you obviously will get none of that treasure if you have no means of getting there and procuring it (execution).

Lots of other good ideas are treasure maps that have a higher probability of being a fake, or have significantly less treasure waiting where X marks the spot. Such maps may be so abundant that no one will be particularly interested in following yours over their own, which is why it usually doesn't make sense to worry about someone running off with your idea.

But if you give someone a copy of a treasure map that they know to be highly reliable and leads to a much bigger treasure than the one they're chasing after now, and they can mobilize the means to get there faster than you, well, therein lies the temptation for someone to run off with your idea.
I guess I can see where he's coming from but the point of all these frameworks is to get the tedious/boring stuff out of the way to focus on your core competency.

No longer can you just be a very good hacker to succeed, you also need to be able to raise money, market your product, and quickly adapt as the excrement hits the fan.

In any case, for good sites there is a lot of algorithm work going on in the back end that may not be visible at first sight (pun intended). This goes back to having good service - you shouldn't have to notice the good but you definitely notice the bad.
> anyone know what speed for it is like

I quickly read over the source code, and it looks like the database is backed by a directory of YAML files. That basically means you get O(log n) performance for random lookups (based on the underlying filesystem, of course), but O(n) searches.

I use this approach for Angerwhale (my blog software), and it mostly works fine because O(100) is always going to be fast :) The reason I didn't use an RDBMS is beacuse I wanted all the data to be editable in a text editor (so I wouldn't have to write management tools). I think I might add optional indexing at some point, though, just to make it a bit more scalable.
Certainly a valid point. And PG's criticisms were deserved as well.

At the same time, I can't help but think some of this is an overreaction. Microsoft beat Apple as well as IBM in the market the first time by letting users pick their hardware vendor. And, even today, they still do that, and that's still Apple's achilles heel in gaining market share -- if someone wants more choice than a half a dozen or so models, they're going to have to buy a system running a different OS.

Yes, Vista sucks. Microsoft has come out with a completely crappy version of it's most important product. But other companies have released crappy products before and have lived on past their mistakes. Intel has released some horrible products before -- i860, Itanium, and the P4 all come to mind -- and pretty much all of them happened because they thought it was more important to keep their profits skyrocketing by controlling the market than it was to give customers what they wanted. But Intel has recovered from all of those debacles and once again makes the best CPUs around -- Core 2 Duo is great.

The fact that people are clinging to XP says that people at least perceive Microsoft operating systems to have value. The real test for Microsoft is whether they can learn from the Vista debacle and focus on making a better product the next time out with Windows 7. Having one failed product cycle isn't likely to sink them, but a second one could.

I run Ubuntu and I don't regret it for a second. It's a great system, and I like it better than Windows (or OS X, for that matter). But I think it's silly to say that Microsoft should just pack up and surrender because they shipped something that sucked.
Video of the talk here: [http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/98110/Paul_Graham_Partner_Y_Co...]

I enjoyed the essay, but found the video communicated the idea much better somehow.
Paul Graham revisits Adam Smith on economics?
Whatever the skills it gives you, the PhD in Business is designed for those who want to teach at a university level.

They're highly competitive (I think 2-5% accpetance rates are the norm) and it would be tough to outperform the other students in the admissions process unless you can demonstrate the same or better "fit"; that is, Odds are even more stacked against you if you intend to use your education to practice, not to teach.
The poster meant http://www.rubyonrails.org ?

Comes up as one of those annoying squat pages, yet http://rubyonrails.org gives me the regular RoR homepage.
How Do You Think of Problems to Solve?
It seems like the best way to get an idea going to just to think of a problem. However, even this doesn't seem very easy. How do you do when you try to think of problems to solve? How do you poke your memory?
Great to see such a diverse mix of people - I met fellow Brits, people from across the US and even someone who traveled over from New Zealand.

The line up was top-notch, and between Greg McAdoo's and Sam Altman's fundraising demystification, DHH's evangelism of charging users, PG's preaching about being good, and the opinionated snoring dude with the hat, it was both an inspirational and entertaining day.
Startup School videos on Omnisio, synchronized with slides and questions
Good point. However, if "being good to your users" is the meaning of "good" in the article, then using the word "good" (with all its connotations) might be misleading. "Good" basically reduces to "do what your users want".
Interesting, maybe you've got it cached? For me both are pointing to the annoying squat page. I'll try refreshing my DNS.
(The rest are being uploaded as we speak)
> If they assigned a few engineers to work on this, they could replicate the functionality within few months, especially since they know the internals of Outlook.

Counter-exhibit 1: Vista.

Apparently the MS development process makes it almost impossible to get anything done within the bureaucracy these days.

Their best results are from their research groups (e.g. Haskell) but those are people paid to work on what they want to work on anyway.

You can't just assign developers randomly to something and get the same results.

In fact, given Outlook's bugs and lack of functionality in these areas you could make a pretty compelling argument that, despite their knowledge of its internals, those are about the last people you'd want to put in charge of making Outlook work. They already got their shot and look what happened!
They are now both back to normal for me.
I liked Norvig's talk a lot, though I got the impression it may have been too technical for some people that late in the day.

Both Pauls gave really excellent talks too.
I don't think all business people are assholes and I didn't say that.

My point was really just to bring up the idea that the people you surround yourself with can have a big influence on who you become. There's a lot you can say about the way hackers behave in general and the same is true for MBAs. In both cases there are lots of exceptions.
You can try to solve your own problems, and see where they might be problems for other people, too. If you've run out of problems, you can try to be either more curious, or more discriminating.

You can hold a tool in the back of your head, and try applying it to everything, to see if it might fit. This requires discipline. It is often much better to hold a problem in your head, and see if new tools might apply, Feynman used this technique to great effect.

Or you can try to solve other people problems. This requires insight, but it also requires empathy. This is a hard thing to cultivate. It can't be turned on like a switch, and it's difficult to empathize with those far from your life experience. But there are many people who've lived lives similar to yours -- if your friends don't have any problems in their lives, they are unusually charmed.
Indeed! Startup School keeps getting better every year.

Jessica, PG, and crew -- thanks!
i think microsoft beat apple because apple was busy beating itself. apple had about a ten-year lead in gui operating systems, but couldn't keep up. steve jobs was immature, and engineered things such that he was made irrelevant in his own company. the dude's firing on all cylinders now, and is virtually unstoppable.

it's very painful to switch operating systems, due to network effects. all your friends use windows, you've spent a lot of money on windows software, people you know pass around windows-centric .xls and .doc files, you've been using windows long enough to have become familiar with it, etc. if it wasn't for all that, i think apple would have already eaten about half of microsoft's lunch.
I'd argue that "the very best hackers" can pick and choose.

"Up-and-coming" != "the very best".

Maybe they'll get to be the some of the very best with some experience (work or project) under their belt, and at that point, if it's great code/work, they can absolutely get a job (almost) anywhere.

I'm not sure what the rest of your points have to do with the PG quote exactly. Yes there are many factors around what job works for you given your current situation. You still have options, they may just be options that don't make sense for you, or that carry more risk than you're personally happy to take on, etc...
I think PG's qualification of "very best" is important here. While he has restricted his assessment to programmers, that need not be the case. This is applicable to the very best in any profession.

I don't consider myself to be in the category of very best hackers, but I am pretty good, and I have never worried about money. If you have a decent reputation there will always be somebody practically begging for you to take their money to do some work for them.

While you're probably correct that no one person can just unilaterally walk into Google and give themselves a job, the very best hackers can get pretty close to that. I'm sure they're probably an email or a phone call away from getting an interview. If you haven't tried to find good programmers, it'll be difficult to grasp just how very difficult it is to find good programmers. I have interviewed programmers for a number of positions and, quite frankly, it is a bit disconcerting what I have seen. In the past 2 years I have interviewed about 20 programmers and only 1 blew me away. He was just brilliant. Roughly 4 were good. And the other 15 were kind of crappy. We were forced to hire more than 4...
I know a lot of really smart people who can't program worth a darn.

If you want to work at MS you're already lacking in the taste department. And what's the interview process, brainteasers or BSing your way through random estimates like the number of gas stations in the country?

Being good at bluster can make someone seem pretty smart. But the computer doesn't care about that. It filters out what you can really do from what you can fool people into thinking you can do.
You're doing it wrong.

Talk to a real-live accountant.
Thank you YC! And thank you everyone I met there! You were all great! So much talent and potential in one room was very humbling.

Great speakers and great topics. I learned a lot, met a lot of folks, and had fun. Thanks again!
That's a giant slap in the face of every engineer working in a big corporation.
Totally not worth the time (unless you're going to switch careers or something like that). As so many people noted yesterday, you can get all of the useful information from books and blogs and self-help groups. Also, anything that it's not worth your time to learn on your own, you'll probably hire/outsource anyways (e.g., payroll, legal, hr, etc.).
> who will probably work half-heartedly for a few months/year,

That's what 4-year vesting is for. Besides, part-time work from an expert is better than full-time work from the hoi polloi.
You gave an angel 60% of your company?

You don't know if you will be taxed on your 40% contribution, and yet you already went through with the deal?

Your advisors are unable to answer your fairly simple questions?

Something is wrong here...
Just speaking from my own experience. If I say to myself "Yeah that might be useful", I bookmark it, and probably never get around to looking at it again.
I also know a lot of dumb people that can't program worth a damn. What's your point?

Wanting to work a corporation that has big revenues with job security, stability, steady paychecks, interesting projects (yes, there are still interesting projects everything from online, web, to Xbox), big campus treatment, vacation, healthcare benefits, and et al. Yeah, that's just an outright dumb move.
I assume your estimates of how hard it is and how fast the Outlook team can develop are completely ex-recto.

Here's some data. Outlook's last two major releases were in '03 and '06. In those 3 years they added the following visible features:

- todo bar

- better calendar UI

- RSS aggregator

- search

[Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Outlook]

Xobni might be as useful and interesting as all those combined, and the Xobni team can deliver it today. The evidence suggests that Microsoft would take years to deliver something similar.
My next YC idea: A plugin for Vista that makes it work.
Because Bill Gates stays up all night worrying about what steveblgh on Hacker News thinks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations

:-\

Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?

Is it just me, or are pg's many draft-readers (and presumably fact-checkers) sleeping on the job here? I mean, c'mon,

http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/510.html

or, specifically, the company that more-or-less cured malaria (indirectly), until the efforts were quashed by goody-two-shoeses,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geigy_Pharmaceutical
My Life on Facebook as a Woman and Why Social Network Advertising Doesn't Work
Yes, and looking at purpose another way: if something is worth doing it's worth doing at a profit, because non-profit enterprises are always underfunded.
Brings new meaning to "software as a service."
wow, i wonder what work you were supposed to be doing.