skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Thinking of an idea is the first step and also the one of the hardest parts of a startup."

If you are isolated, maybe. But not if you are already among your customers. They have so many ideas, I can't keep up. And I come up with many more watching them struggle. They're the ones stuck with crappy software, trying to get stuff done every day. They always tell me, "If I only had this, then I could do that..."

Because I'm already so close to my customers, my problem isn't coming up with ideas; it's deciding which ones to run with.

Got technical skills but having trouble coming up with ideas? Get away from your terminal and out into the field. Problem solved.
That Peer Insight study citing is from a Fast Company article about design. I think it was the Dec '07 issue. They referenced that statistic in the cover story article as well as in the letter from the editor. The statistic was my inspiration for this post. I have not seen the study myself, so take that out-of-context-statistic (and all others you ever come across) with salt.

Fast Company "Letter From the Editor" citing the study is here:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/119/letter-from-the-edit...

Fast Company Article, "All About Yves", citing the same study is here:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/119/all-about-yves.html

(These appeared in the same issue. "The Design Issue" | Dec '07)

Peer Insight:
http://www.peerinsight.com/

-Wade
Lying? Your face will give you away: study.
Its actually not, if you analyze all the costs. You get a very SEO friendly store, access to Amazon's recommendation engine, review system, and a few more pretty good things. You can sell Amazon products, if you need to fill out some areas of your store, and you don't have to worry about shipping those. You also don't have any hosting fees or bandwidth fees, no matter how many visitors you get or how big you grow. The credit card processing fees are included, and there's no need to get a merchant account either, which for some people with bad credit is hard. And besides that, it saves a person who might not have a lot of programming skills a heck of a lot of time, which I think would also be worth a lot to some people.
Please, please, please think about this--hard--if your startup charges people money. The removal of money from the customer's wallet must be as close to frictionless as possible.
The first comment says "Techcrunch only shows startups in the US or startups from the insiders - people who know Mike Arrington personally."

I know this is not the case. My company is not in the US and I don't know Mike Arrington. I just contacted them through their standard form, they liked one of our products and reviewed it favorably:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/23/twitter-trends-twist/
This story is a perfect example of why this site should have downvotes.

A) It's old
B) Therefore it's not news
C) Even if it was new, it's so amazingly un-exciting that it's not news anyways.
Exchange Stumble Not Effective Anymore
Curiously enough, the article's author's homepage says that Friedman is his academic advisor, so Friedman may well have been teaching the Programming Languages course where the author picked up the technique.
True, but you need to do a bit of filtering: clients tend to go on flights of fancy for things they say they want but would never pay for if you actually produced it for them.
What's the argument? I would be interested in hearing it because I don't see Apple gaining much more than headaches from Yahoo.
Sounds very cool, actually; nice idea.
Arrington posted about one of the Twitter developers leaving, directing negative comments at the developer personally.
I think post editing gets disabled after an hour or two, presumably to create a permanent record.
Also, accoring to http://www.en.rankings.hu/ Firefox 2.x is the most used web browser version in Hungary. (Although IE6 + IE7 combined are still way beyond 50%.)
It's more unfortunate that a few bad apples in the past have made these laws necessary in the first place. Asking someone about their life is hardly a crime, but our governments seem to have no problem making it so. Score another point against a good employer / employee relationship.
Microsoft-Yahoo : Just Walk Ballmer | MiiJoo.com
Seconded. Xfce provides the best of both worlds, although I tend to stick to the normal one for most things. It's quicker and lighter than Gnome, while being clean and simple, and doesn't look like an odd attempt at "Windows XP 2" like KDE.
From the Wikipedia page:

In academic circles it has been argued that, under certain circumstances, these clauses are not economically efficient in that the partner who values the company most is not always the one that ends up buying the company. De Frutos and Kittsteiner suggest in their paper that in order to ensure an efficient outcome, there should not be a contractual obligation for the party who triggers the clause to name the price. Instead, they advocate including in the termination agreement a clause stating that the parties will negotiate for the right to be the person who chooses whether to buy or sell at the price specified by the other partner. They suggest that this negotiation takes the form of an ascending auction where the shareholders bid for the right not to set the price per share. Each partner raises his/her bid continuously, but either partner can drop out of the auction at any time. The party that drops out becomes the one who must propose the price per share, but that person receives a payment from the other partner equal to the bid at which the auction ended. The first and most well known of these specialty firms is The Shotgun Fund(tm).

Why not put something along those lines in the contract?
I think that this is an important point. The term "startup" has been narrowed to the point where it doesn't include what are disparagingly referred to as "lifestyle companies".

And I think that's really unfortunate because controlling the language controls the thinking.

Let's face it: people (at least in tech circles) think it is very cool to be in a startup. And it is in the VCs interests to further that sense -- of being caught up in something big and exciting.

It lends a rockstar sensibility to a startup that is NOT conferred to a lifestyle company.

Even reading at Paul's posting on this tends to reinforce that subtle dig -- look at the examples: "landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant". None of those sound exciting to me.

Perhaps my issue is that the measure of "grow very large" is ambiguous. Does it mean large profits? Sorry, Facebook. Large revenues? Sorry Youtube. Spending lots of money? Yay Webvan! Perhaps it means employing lots of people -- which the left-winger in me approves of mightily!

I've always felt that the goal should be to touch as many lives a possible. That's my personal metric on which I base "large". This is consistent with Paul's examples -- you can touch a limited number of people with a landscaping company or a shoe store or a restaurant.

But on the web you can touch a LOT of lives with a small set of money. I would hazard that David's touched far more lives at 37Signals through their consumer products and through Rails than all by one or two of the startups on YC or part of YC.

That's large.

In my world, that counts as a startup.
Unfortunately, bzr is still pretty slow at log. It's also slow at branching a remote repo, and subsequent merges or pulls from that remote repo. On the bright side, it used to be unusably slow (for large projects, anyway) when doing things like status, diff, or commit, but these have all become considerably faster in recent releases, so there's hope that the still-slow commands will become fast in the future too.

I agree with you about usability. Nearly everything in bzr just works, which was why I ultimately decided against using hg (no dumb server support? ouch!) or git (where you need to understand its internals far too well in order to get anything done).
Commodore goes titsup (again)
Blyk, the free MVNO, reaches 100,000 members
Granted - but the important point edw519 is getting at, I'd say, is that getting close to clients is a way of reducing the problem from thinking of an idea de novo to filtering out the good ones. I'd count that as a major win.

Unfortunately, some of us don't have that luxury. In my current gig, I'm insulated from actual customers by a substantial distance and half a mile of extremely cautious beaurocracy. This is not conducive to customer sensitivity, to put it mildly.
I wish they would reveal active members instead. I'm a blyk member, but have never gotten my phone to work with their network.
Of course. After a while you get pretty good at filtering. And sometimes they come up with something a lot of others would pay for.
Nintendo's Virtual Console Packs an Old School Punch
"In my current gig, I'm insulated from actual customers..."

Probably one of the many reasons this board is so popular. Hang in there.
And it's not like nobody's using it. The Pidgin developers are using it.

Side note: http://www.monotone.ca lists Git/Cogito as an alternative, but not plain Git.
Quickstart Quide on Wireshark - world's most popular open source network tool
Yeah, but that technique is obsolete now. Most modern currencies print notes on paper of different sizes. I seem to recall that it was used to create US dollar bills of a higher denomination.
Rel=”nofollow” in Real Life
It's not immoral to want to be immortal
Student ratings on the Internet correlate with student ratings on paper? Great.

It would be interesting to study what happens to students whose teachers have a reputation as smart, but tough graders, versus the opposite. RrateMyProfessors would have the data on that (if they could get information on student income).
"37s viewpoint is more about a sustainable "small" business. Both are valid."

But IMHO 37s viewpoint has little to do with startups. Sure, we could all go and build a modest business that can grow to a small/medium size, and sustain us. But I'm guessing that would count as a failure for a lot of us.
That's good to know! From some of the comments around here, I was starting to feel a little like the guy who showed up at the party uninvited. I probably take things too personally. :)
I didn't notice that. Good point.
Start a business, not a startup
Don't forget "No, you don't have to sell to google for millions"
Who Takes More Risk, The VC or The Entrepreneur?
I am wondering what code could have this effect.

Off topic: I just signed up for FeedFlix. Looks really cool! Great job! (update: submitted it to yc news)
Can we get a spam filter :/
Get more out of your Netflix subscription
"The best way to get good ratings is to be relatively easy on grades, good looking or both"

"Last year, a scholarly study found a high correlation between RateMyProfessors.com and a university’s own system of student evaluations."

This is not "another victory for Web 2.0". This shows that both systems are flawed because they are both correlated with the wrong metrics!
I was just trying to provide a heuristic to answer your question. I don't think it's black and white though. As for Threadless, I do think it's a startup because they invented a new process to fill a temporary market disequilibrium. But if another company came along and did the same thing then I'm not so sure.
You mean, a recommendation engine?
For those of you interested in growing a business, read Paul Hawken's, "Growing a Business": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0671671642

For those of you arguing for or against, read Joel's Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry's vs. Amazon: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html

I am with the 37signals guys on this one. DHH's startup school presentation was refreshing.
The Uno - The Craziest Motorcycle You've Ever Seen
yeah, it's called just reading the front page and not the newest links ;)
That doesn't seem weird to me at all. I recently had to work on a project involving PHP and couldn't find a good PHP mode for Emacs (any suggestions, in case I have to do it again?). I ended up doing some of it in another editor and was constantly trying to use Emacs keybindings. It's hard to go to anything else when you're hooked on Emacs.
Am I the only one that thinks 'startup' simply means a new business without profits? This just seems like a silly semantic debate. 37signals was a startup once, it just happened to choose a different outcome.

Every startup should be free to choose their outcome, and if most choose to try and quickly flip, then more power to them. If they choose to try and build a profitable independent business, great! There is no need to turn the 'liquidity event' vs 'sustainable business' camps into warring factions, like some weird language flame war.

It was refreshing at SUS to see a contrasting opinion, but neither side is trying to argue that their way is the only way. Both ways obviously work, and I think anyone would be happy with either of them over not succeeding at all.
3 stories on the front page are from 37signals. Essentially saying pretty much the same thing - "You're wrong", "You're wrong", and "You're even wronger".
Just gets a little tiresome IMHO.
This might help:

Greasemonkey to blacklist sites. http://www.andrewfarmer.name/2008/04/greasemonkey.html

I like their posts so far and would not like to see them gone.
Y'know, I liked DHH's talk as much as anyone. It was a good talk, which provided an interesting and much-needed contrasting perspective. But haven't we had a sufficient number of reports, notes, videos, paraphrases, discussions, comparisons to other talks, rebuttals and repeats-of-the-same-thing-by-some-other-guy by now?
When I first started reading about DSLs I thought "what a great idea". But the more examples I see, the less convinced I am that there's anything there.
ouch! That was stupid, thanks for the correction.
Can academic researchers get "press hits"?

I work in computer vision, and the approach described in this article is nowhere near a standard or agreed upon approach for this problem (there isn't one so far). The article focuses exclusively on the research of one team of researchers (not really the "leaders" in this field either), ignoring many landmark and prototype systems released over the past several years...
There is no need to 'pick a side' ... this should not be a flame war. Honestly, the 'argument' is over the best way to make millions. That is like arguing over whether it's better to 'have your cake' or 'eat it too'.
What do you mean that it "finally explains the African Eve"? There would have to be a last universal common female ancestor whether this had happened or not.
More Mail I Love
Well I guess it really depends... I don't see Apple's business model really including an online ecosphere...

It would be interesting... though I think Apple just counts on the developer community to provide the online services for their iPhones, iPods and so on...
added contact information to my profile, the name of the man would be Sid Emmert
Sounds like a more friendly version of http://yubnub.org/
Humans! Fascinating!
"OMG, dont take profesor smiths class. he was to hard on grades. u will regret it 4eva!!!"
It is like: A guy is told "hey get a supermodel gf!" and "hey get a friendly gf!", when the poor guy would go out with any girl given she is neither ugly nor psychotic.
Exactly. My favourite slide that I saw at Startup School was Paul Bucheit's one that said "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization", since it was a great antidote to all the other talks.

If you listen to the 37signals guys, they're going to tell you the best way to get rich is to do pretty much what they're doing. If you listen to PG, he's going to tell you the best way to get rich is to do pretty much what he did. Both business models are valid, and they both work. If you're thinking of starting a business, you should keep both models (and several others) in mind and pick the one that best suits your situation, your needs, your ambitions, your available funding and your product.

Of course, that doesn't mean that it's useless to sit around and discuss the upsides and downsides of various business models -- that's actually a very useful discussion. But it is silly to argue that one is better overall.
Ask YC: How to avoid front-end clutter?
I suppose most front-end developers/designers heard of this problem before: too much CSS and Javascript files and too much declarations in 'em. After a while it gets hard to find your way around all the classes in there and add or fix things. Next to that you might scratch certain server-side code and forget to update the client-side bits. We tried to fix this by creating a lot of different CSS/JS files but sometimes certain declarations span across different site sections and you end up looking for them in the wrong place anyway.

How do you guys combat the mess you automatically make in the front-end? Do you use frameworks like Blueprint or perhaps SASS? I still haven't found any structure or convention that kind of forces me to do it DRY and neat, like for instance RoR has done for me. Maybe it's time to create a standard for this, or just to create some naming pattern to map front-end code to server-side? Or maybe that already exists?

Any thoughts?

(I hope I didn't explain this too vague, I'm trying hard not to)
Blacklist sites you don't want to see in Hacker News
A printable version: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_...

Still reading otherwise I'd have something else to add.
In the past week this has progressively turned into a "startups" vs "businesses" meme.

Regardless of your definition, each is simply a different approach towards business, and as such, they will take different paths (VC funded, angel, self funded) towards their goals. There is no panacea and no single way to succeed, so articles like this that imply otherwise just sound a bit pretentious.
It does seem strange. Almost as if the writer already bought the futures and wants panic buying so that he can make big money on his bet by an upward spiral in food prices as shortages spread.
Sure he can... we'd all qualify anyway!
Duncan Bannatyne doesn't want to be the richest man in the graveyard
Simpatigo: Route planner with a wiki twist
Fleaflicker (solo founder) Acquired by AOL
It just seems that this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg has all the same data, and more "context", as you can see his comments and peoples replies.

Also, the majority of his comments are somewhat, uh, boring when you see them all laid out. Just simple comments/replies a lot of the time really.

I would hardly call this a "giant essay", it's more like half of a Twitter feed...
Wordpress, but I used MT in the past. I prefer Wordpress due to the amount of nice add-ons, themes, etc that are available.
I thought the goal was to make the founders rich, which so far hasn't
included growing into a big company.

I think it's a bit early to pass judgement on this point..how many big, sound companies have been built in three years?
Thanks for that detailed reply, I've been looking for ways to sell ads directly and that site should come in handy. Appreciate the tip!
http://friendfeed.com/nadim
Correct, usually we go out with whoever says YES.

And that's my own experience with startup. Everyone has a plan until they get into the mud.
Ubuntu starting with version 7.10 kicks OSX butt when it comes to font rendering. The default setting is not-so-awesome (I suspect to cater to folks transitioning from Windows, since it's a bit Windows-like) but if you configure it to slight hinting + subpixel smoothing (I suspect this is what KDE does), it destroys everything else. My few Mac-loving friends (and even wife) agree.

Linux font superiority isn't as noticeable on English alphabet, but with other languages it especially shines. That's the power of free software for you: people in those countries made sure their language is getting premium treatment so they worked with FreeType guys, while Apple had to deal with "priorities".
FriendFeed Is The Social Network For Power-Users
How could it possibly be relevant to your hiring decision how old someone is, or what neighborhood they live in?
Deploying and tuning Django
Winds up as a sort-of shaggy dog story.

"...and here's how this ties into my family's persecution by the Nazis."
The amount of flattery pg receives on this site is sickening.
I used to run 50 bittorrent downloads simultaneously off of my kuro just fine. A wrist watch could handle it.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of managers actually follow this advice consciously.
Are you the founder?
This is the site I am working on - I'd greatly appreciate feedback from HN on what you guys think.

Btw, RWW covered FeedFlix a couple days ago: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feedflix.php
Yeah, imagine what the HN readers who have families and focus on profit must feel.

The upvotes and comments mean that some (lots) of HN readers appreciate the discussion and the alternate viewpoint.
Yes. But that isn't to say people will be giving out strings of numbers as identifiers. The point is that those identifiers are pretty useless today, so may as well stop using them for human consumption.
This app is awesome. If there is anyone on the fence, I assure you that your time will be well spent checking this out.
Congrats :) Nice to know that single founders can make it as well.

Any hint about the sale price?
I'm surprised I haven't seen more about this yet. Doesn't anyone realize that these smaller businesses are good for 37signals?

Starting companies designed to change the world either succeed or die, and they tend to find out which very fast, which leaves a good number of them dead. Those dead ones have no reason to stay subscribed to campfire. 37signals will make more money on "lifestyle" businesses than startup businesses (if startup is defined as high technology, get rich or die trying).

It's the long tail of business types. On the left, taller side, you have a few wildly successful companies (startup or otherwise). Just to the right of that, there are the moderately successful ones. They don't make as much, but there are more of them. To the right of that there extends a massive tail of "lifestyle" or similar businesses that didn't set out to change the world or make the founders billions - millions maybe, but not billions. The farther that long tail extends to the right, the larger the market potential for 37signals products.

The point is that they don't make money on the hight of the graph (the success of the companies) but by the length of the graph (the number of companies).

Bottom line: it's good business for 37signals to encourage more lifestyle companies. I don't blame them for it. In fact, it's actually pretty smart of them.
A deeper explanation of the "portfolio" view of investing.
Having a fairly unhealthy obsession with entrepreneurship, and having actually read some of the research, rather than generalizing from my own experience, there is one basic reason why VC funding works better than bootstrapping. That is that small companies (less than roughly a million $ in revenue) are much more likely to be hurt by random events - key employees leaving, acts of god, macroeconomic events, etc. Getting big isn't just about making millions, it's about increasing the chances of survival. And when you hear a bootstrapped company talking about their path as the only way to go, just repeat the words "survivorship bias" to yourself.
Actually, someone suggested I look at the source code rather than submit a ton of URLs and try to reverse-engineer the logic by looking at the results. Here's the relevant code fron news.arc:

(defmemo sitename (url)
(let toks (parse-site url)
(if (isa (saferead (car toks)) 'int)
(tostring (prall toks "" "."))
(let (t1 t2 t3 . rest) toks
(if (or (mem t1 multi-tld-countries)
(and t3 (mem t2 long-domains)))
(string t3 "." t2 "." t1)
(string t2 "." t1))))))

; Minor bug: can have both google.at and google.co.at. Same for jp.

(= multi-tld-countries* '("uk" "jp" "au" "in" "ph" "tr" "za" "my" "nz" "br"
"mx" "th" "sg" "id" "pk" "eg" "il" "at"))

(= long-domains* '("blogspot" "wordpress" "livejournal" "blogs" "typepad"
"weebly" "blog-city" "com"))
Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?