skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People often say that what they design ends up looking like crap. But that's like saying that your program "ends up" working like crap. If it's not good enough, all it means is it's unfinished.
I am not a solo founder, so I am not speaking from personal experience (well, I am to an extent - I am a founder whose startup is my job, but I do have a partner).

I would assume that motivation is a lot easier when the startup IS your job as opposed to an evening/weekend project, even for a solo founder. Unless you're already rich, chances are you're not doing it exclusively for fun - you're doing it to earn a living somewhere down the road, so you're racing against time. Even if you have savings, they won't last forever, and there is always the opportunity cost ticking away in the background.

That's a lot of motivation, when there's no lifeline. You sink or swim, where sinking likely means having to go back to a day job.
RSS feeds?
Agree, sf.net has too many projects on it and checkin/chekout speed is very slow sometimes. I have a project on Google Code and so far I am happy with it.

I also use github, so far has not seen problems. As ruby on rails moved to git, I believe lots of open source ruby projects may follow.
Congratz!
15K hits only? I thought getting TCed would get you at least 50K to 75K.
Still great.. and good app too.
thanks!
Day-to-day motivation is easy: My company is my job, if I don't work on it it will fail, and there will be no one to blame for that but myself.

Work when you work. Rest when you rest. Play when you play. If you're too unfocused to work, don't waste that time: Rest instead and put the hours in when you're refreshed later.

Funding was easy enough: Set aside as much as you can each month and invest it against the market index. In a few years you'll have a nest egg which can see you through a good period of modest living without a single penny of revenue. It really doesn't take a lot to support yourself if you focus on the essentials, and knowing you've a good buffer to see you through to profitability takes a lot of the pressure (and distraction) off of paying your bills. Immodest living can come later -- you'll be too busy building up your business to live rich anyhow.

Business ideas were a snap: They magically come while you're working for others (and building up your nest egg for self-funding). Just pay attention to your surroundings and identify where there are unmet needs (those can often be measured by the volume of workplace profanity). Think on those and consider solutions you might put together yourself.
Actually, my boyfriend turned me onto Buddhism. He grew up with it - he's from Sri Lanka. He meditates every day, so much so that when he went to SF and they wired him up with the electrodes, his brain waves were really different.

He's no wimp - He's a VP of a public tech company. He says it clears his mind, helps him make balanced decisions, and navigate company politics. Judgment is one of the most difficult parts of being an entrepreneur - so that anything that helps that could be positive.
Everyone at once

"Its' Crackers"

*Tips White Hat
Bet your friends $500 that you can lose more than they can.

A morning after a booze and pizza filled night, my buddy and I were feeling particularly fat. So we placed a bet, the one who loses most will win a bet. He invited another fat friend. So three of us each put $500 into a envelope ($1,500 all in), and we had 6 weeks to lose as much as possible. We weighed in immediately (3 times each, taking the average, very anal about the details). 6 weeks later one had lost 8lbs, one 20lbs and I lost 23lbs (I was completely dehydrated!), but we were skinny and I was rich. It was the easiest way of losing weight ever.
PayPal Considering Blocking Older IE, Firefox Browsers From Site
Geez...the guy goes to India once in his life and people never stop complaining.
"approximately what humans were designed to eat"

and humans weren't approximately designed to sit in chairs for 10-12 hours day typing away staring at a computer screen.

the diet matched the activity.
Movement grows for digital day of rest
"diet" implies your normal eating habits, not a change in eating habits.

go to a nutritionist and they will ask you "what's your diet like?"
AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010
Ning's Infinite Ambition (good read on user acquisition)
mid 20's? i don't think you are too old for the YC audience :)
Startup School Resources Page Wins Mahalo Page Creating Contest
I used SF in the past (prior to their svn adoption) and it was slow, lots of forms to fill for a setup, and the process to deliver the downloads was cumbersome.

Google Code requires a free Google Account and a simple form. If you can live with svn, you'll find that its features are simple yet powerful (wiki, downloads page, svn browser, issues tracker). Another thing i like is that you can give admin/commit access to other Google accounts easily.

Launchpad is also a good alternative if your code is under a free license. You'll have the features of bzr, issues tracker and others, and if you're packing for Debian/Ubuntu, you can use Launchpad PPA to build your packages for 32 and 64 bit architectures for free.
Venture capital funding diminishes
Make sure you are doing something that you can accomplish and have launched in a 1 to 3 month window of time.

I went for something super complex and it taken me years to get a point where everything is stable, it has enough features, and to where it is flexible enough to create additional products on the same base of it. It has been a hard road and I am battle scarred from it.
I dunno. I like my Skype account. Good for calling home. At the office we use it to communicate with our offices in Europe.
I may not be correct about this, but here's the parallel that was running through my mind as I read this:

Ning is to social networks now as Movable Type was to blogs in, oh, say 2003. It's a private company that has found a way to make it dead simple for anyone to come along and make a social network of their own, what Movable Type did for blogging.

The article paints Ning as unstoppable, but if the parallel holds then the end I would foresee is the eventual arrival of an open source rival, a la what Wordpress brought to the blogging scene. (Whether that ends up being Buddypress or some other alternative I couldn't say.)

Thoughts?
The ability to deliver projects and build a developer community belong much higher on this ladder. Raising money is like getting hired, it's not a real accomplishment: paying investors back is, as is getting paid by customers. The ability to build a profitable company isn't broken out on the list and should be.
You're right, you can have your code in svn on Google Code, and setup the project on Launchpad, so the code is automagically imported into a Bzr branch.

I've got a Bzr branch (https://code.launchpad.net/~vcs-imports/gtkfilesplitter/trun...) imported from (http://gtkfilesplitter.googlecode.com/svn/)
I'm sure GitHub will add a bug tracking system, and in the meantime a simple Wiki is a workable solution for bug-tracking.

If it works for Wikia it can work for me too.
I would worry a lot more about where you spend your time than your money.
how is keeping both current working for you?
The "Morning Pages" concept from "The Artist's Way at Work" http://www.amazon.com/dp/0688166350

Write three pages in longhand first thing in the morning every day. Can be stream of consciousness, a journal, a story, or even "I don't know what to write" over and over.

There are a number of good techniques in the book, but this is the best one to start with.
"Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay." -- Eric Hoffer
Is that automatic, and is it easy to setup? Or do you have to create/import the branch manually?
mm.... I would buy cheap desks. you know the $50 kind. And the cheap chairs are always the most comfortable, believe it or not.

I can't stand working at a desk without a proper keyboard tray and mouse pad.

In many ways having a comfortable working environment is very important. But comfortable != luxurious. Keep it cheap, just not so cheap that you can't get work done because it's not comfortable.
tell yourself that you "owe" it to the millions of users whose life you will make a tiny bite easier/better. it is a mini-purpose. as far as funding i suggest you find a co-founder. that will double your chances and reduce your efforts in half.
github seems nice. I'd also like to point out savannah (http://savannah.gnu.org/), which is particularly nice if you intend to use GPL. Also, it's good for leting you know how to properly handle your licenses when you apply for a project.

It uses cvs, svn and git.
Assuming that by "skimp on" you mean "spend sparingly on a necessity," I'll preemptively refrain from rambling about what's probably not necessary for a tech startup.

Of course, one of my new hobbies, since making the voyage out here, has been to practice the wonderfully fun and interesting "make vs buy" comparison game. You can, and probably will have many opportunities to play this game as a startup founder. This game involves simply asking yourself and/or your team numerous questions of a basic logistical nature:

A) How much does X cost to make, if I get to (or have to, depending on the day) make it myself?
B) How much does X cost to buy?
C) What are the costs, inclusive of shipping/assembly, for scenarios A and B?
D) Do I have anything that can be improvised or are there any possible substitutes that can serve the ultimate purpose of X (i.e. using a door as a desk) in the mean-time?
E) How long can I "live" with the improvised substitute or the idea of an improvised substitute?
F) How much of the actual value of X is imagined; that is, how much have my perceptions been influenced by hype or advertising?

Questions E and F can get complicated, as they relate quite a bit back to the original posit about "necessities" and such. Probably I'm too tired to go into them at the moment, so perhaps in the morning.

I therefore recommend being pretty weary of anything involving hidden "lock-in" costs resultant from usurping alternatives; for example, anything involving a contract probably fits into this category.

Regarding brand loyalty. . . remember that there's a big difference between purchasing actual quality and purchasing advertised "quality." When factoring in costs associated with advertising, the make vs. buy comparison game really can take a person full circle.
>And the cheap chairs are always the most comfortable, believe it or not.

Surely spoken by someone who has never sat in an Aeron...
AAAGH, the hacker diet is really really stupid, there are a lot better ways than that torture! If you want to go nerdy with your diet, try a CRON lifestyle (Calorie Reduced, Optimal Nutrition) and use CRON-o-Meter to track your eating. (http://www.optimal.org/peter/cron.htm)

Why cant you do it the normal way of increased exercise and moderated eating, while you avoid eating junk food and rich desserts? And if you eat desserts & junk, you'll only eat it during weekends or something.
Google code.

SF.net, while trying to make improvements, is hobbled with an old design. Google code is much better. And both use subversion.

Interesting choice to GPL an Apache module, though.
don't forget to bring your iphone for your date though!
accomplish and have launched in a 1 to 3 month window of time

Are you sure you're not taking a grass-is-greener perspective here? People say this 3 month thing a lot, but I'm not sure it happens very often in practice. Building a software product is hard.
Alot of people here are referring to fear of messing up and failing as a means to gain motivation for a startup, whether its letting yourself down or letting others down. I hope people don't get stress confused with actually working hard. Yes, worrying about stuff can make you certainly work hard, but also getting into a good frame of mind every day and getting into a "flow" of completion of tasks works much better.

Running towards something good and being happy while your doing it works just as good, if not better than running away from something bad and being stressed at the same time.
I run a subscription personal wiki service (http://luminotes.com), and I open sourced the software that runs it from the start.. Mostly because I was sick of working on proprietary software for a living. And then two interesting things happened. First, people started signing up for paid subscriptions. And second, no one made a competing service from my source code (yet).

I think in general people overestimate the value of their source code. There are so many other things that you can bring to a business that any copy-cats wouldn't necessarily have (e.g. your knowledge of the source code, your vision for the product, etc). So don't flatter yourself into thinking that as soon as you release the source, a dozen competitors will spring up using your software. And even if they do, you'll still likely out-compete them.

So like making any business decision, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of open sourcing and make a decision based on those. But don't make the common mistake of overestimating the disadvantages.
Its definitely hard, but being a single founder myself, something like this really helps keep me focused. Ive been working by myself since the start of the year, and gave myself a deadline of 3 months to have something i could launch.

I finally setup my site on the production servers this week, and am in the process of testing it with some friends and making small changes. I think ill be ready to go more public with my site in a week or two ... so i'm a bit later than my initial goal ... but without that 3 month figure pushing me on, i think it would have been even harder.
Scaling Mania at MySQL Conference 2008
Bootstrap Yourself!
I didn't get any external funding. At the moment I'm living on savings and my wife's salary. Luckily I've had pretty good jobs for the last few years, and managed to put a bit away, and also lucky that my Wife is fully supportive of me doing this.... I think it would be impossible without that support.

I must say though, as cperciva said above, leaving a well paid job is very motivational too. And the fact that I'm 34, have a mortgage and am about to start a family ... there's no time to be unmotivated :)
All of that in addition to the fact that most early adopters of your site will be on FF, or really anything other than IE6(7).
Can SMS be a publishing medium?
as cperciva said above, leaving a well paid job is very motivational too

To clarify, I didn't leave a well paid job at google -- I turned down a well paying job offer at google. Had I started working for them, I suspect that I would still be there.
Andrew set me up with the tools for Portland, OR

http://portland.startupdrinks.com/

Start posting! We'll drink soon.
Of all the things a startup usually buys, what should one skimp on?

I would say the bottom line is skimp on things that do not directly have a significant impact on your valuation, profitability, primary product/service, or ability to "do well" in your business.

A shorter way to say this is don't spend money on things outside of what you are doing.

There is no reason for fancy furniture, ping-pong tables, the absolute latest computer hardware (unless critical to your startup), or any of the other 'perks' of a stereotypical startup.

After you are beyond the initial startup phase, then you could make arguments for nicer secondary items, to attract talent, or create a certain work environment.
I guess my biggest concern involves cases like mysql. I recently read estimated 1/1000 users pay. Their primary revenue is support. If my primary revenue is service and I give the software away, then everyone can provide the service.
good luck colin!
I thought Marc A's comment at the end of the article was interesting:

We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given
our accelerating growth ... and to make sure we have
plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear
winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get
to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last
crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.

Which is at least a reasonable justification for getting so over-capitalized: get the money while it can be gotten for cheap, don't burn through it, and use the cash reserve to survive the downtown Marc A. is predicting.
Yes, "pmarca expects a 'nuclear winter'" is almost a headline-worthy item itself.
I'm impressed, both with Drew and YC. Even if YC only has one in this group, that's still significant. Do they have more?

- EDIT -

Unless the information is undisclosed, the answer is no.
YC Startup School Community Album
It was great meeting everyone tonight! Tonight also happens to be the proof-of-concept for our startup – making it super easy to share photos of events. You can all see this community created album at http://futurique.com:8080/pingplog/yc/ . If you have any photos of the reception that you didn’t get a chance to submit, please email them to yc@erclab.com

If you are attending Startup School tomorrow, please submit pictures from your phone to the email above. Check out the event live at the same link: http://futurique.com:8080/pingplog/yc/

See you tomorrow!

p.s. please note that this is just a proof-of-concept and neither email nor link are final
I have a ball of sticky tape, and I choose whatever it sticks too.
He does a great job of outlining the problem, but the only solution he suggests is spectacularly wrong. He says that redistribution of income will make us (those with "too much" income) happier because it will narrow our choices. But it won't. The great thing about money is that you can buy anything with it, including the reduction in number of choices. The cachet for many companies (e.g. Apple, Costco) is exactly that: consistently high quality and limited selection.
And it always costs extra.

My biggest motivation for getting rich is not having to deal with insignificant (but unavoidable if you're poor) everyday problems. Being forced to choose is mostly a subset of those problems.
I think it's okay not to opensource, since you're not distributing software but offering a service.
Free software is about sharing and a sense of community.
Running a piece of software on your machine, you should be free to inspect and modify the source, sharing your modifications back. These freedoms don't seem to apply in such a strict sense to web services.
I actually think that the question of the internet is a different one.

I think the barrier between the internet and real life is the signal to noise ratio. we have tons of great examples, this site being one of them.

when someone comes up with an efficient and easy way of personalizing exactly what information you get and what is blocked without the fear of missing something important, they will become a huge company.
haha believe me it wasn't worth it
I don't see what exactly Ozzie doesn't "get". He made a fairly straightforward point, i thought. "People want interoperability, we're giving them interoperability". You can debate good faith all day, but MS of 10 years ago would never have released those documents to the EU.

There is that rift, sure, but I'm fairly sure they see it very clearly as a feature. Selling proprietary software is their raison d'être. Check back when openoffice starts eating at ms office's market share.
That's interesting. Do you know how accurate the calories to weight conversion is?
Why aren't they "cash flow positive"? How do you spend $44 million and not make money?

I'm not being rhetorical, I admire what Ning is doing.
LoL yeah Im in my early 30s and doesn't stop me from applying to these great opportunities!

32, single, no kids... startup is life!
I'll be the first to admit my perspective is limited, but for me, the "magic" is the ability to seamlessly and easily embed documents in a web page. Before iPaper, getting casual users to view a PDF or doc was brutal because it added another layer of complexity.

The user had to be able to understand and navigate an outside application, and what's worse, had to have the desire and memory to return to your website afterwards. iPaper simplifies the whole process and is worlds better than Acrobat Reader in terms of speed and simplicity.
is it bad that I was thinking dx, dy....
The investment bankers who got the missing $10 million might differ in that opinion :)
Linux mint rocks!
An instance of Feynman being quite, quite incorrect.
I like going through wikiquote's various entries, and was reading Feynman's otherwise interesting comments, until I got to this:

[QUOTE]
If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another...
[/QUOTE]

Wrong. The one sentence to pass on (with the understanding that it is automatically believed) is this: There is no god, therefore look elsewhere for truth.
> How do you spend $44 million and not make money?

Investing in Ning? ;)
Why do you think this should be the case?
As soon as I got a user I started to feel pressure to make their life easier, the fact the first 10 users were my friends and relatives didn't matter. Once you get users, you get feature requests, once you implement feature requests they say "thank you - that's awesome", you smile and that powers you for a week at least.

The trick is to pick the right feature requests that power you and empower your users.

Good luck.
Are you trying to argue that that statement would be the most useful to the future generation? That is not the goal of the statement Feynman is proposing. It is to contain the most information in the fewest words. The non-existence of God isn't information like the atomic hypothesis is.
You can put your code wherever you like but please put your mailing list on Google Groups. Finding stuff in Google Groups is SO much easier then SF.

That may swing your decision.
Attention Profiling and APML
One project I did about 3 years ago, a modeling portfolio site http://www.profolios.com/ took a little less then 3 months to make. It is far out of date now, the marketing guy wasn't selling as much as he thought and kept on demanding just an unlimited amount of programming. But in that window of time I got a lot done, I still have the code for myself if I ever want to do anything with it.

A single founder can push out a lot of code in a short amount of time. You just really need to know exactly what you want and you need to know your language good enough to not have to be learning it at the same time you are using it.
Making my own meals helps me. I try to start from scratch as much as possible and avoid fatty meats. Plus, cooking my own food makes it more enjoyable to eat, which means its easier to eat healthily. The inventive aspect is also fun.
other than forums/bug trackers is there any existing software foss software specifically designed for this?
sure if I want an easily hacked site.

phpBB is renowned for security vulnerabilities.
Increasing the speed throughout the extent of a treadmill run takes my mind off the pain, cuz I'm trying to appreciate the slower speeds before I have to go faster:)
don't even know what that is. But chair brands don't matter to me. From what I have had to choose from in office supply/department stores. The cheap ones are more comfy than the expensive ones on average, and especially on a cost/value ratio.
That isn't science.