skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, it would have reduced flaming on Reddit, but it would have made the groupthink problem terrible. I'm not sure which one is worse.
A company that starts small but grows very large could describe exactly the 'Italian Restaurant' sort of startup. On the web you have a much bigger neighbourhood than any Italian restaurant. The limitation on a landscaping company, for example, is its ability to scale and the geographic area it can serve.
pg has been specifically keeping the definition of "startup" narrow, to describe only the businesses that go through the two-guys-plus-vc-plus-sleepless-nights-equals-fast-megabucks pattern that we saw in 2000. I think that's the model he's most interested in, that he sees as the most dynamic and rewarding.

Shiny.

That said, the things you describe closely match what I've wanted to pursue. For me, and many others, it's the more rewarding, long-term way of doing things. Your talk at SS08 was a huge breath of fresh air.

But, I don't think it's all that fair to dilute someone else's definition of a startup with your own idea of what a startup is. It might be time to come up with a different term, and let startup mean the thing that pg and the vc guys and others want it to mean.
It's hard enough convincing people that the 1% to 2% that Shopify charge is worth it.

However, it is a slight sweetener that this seems to include all credit card processing fees.
I think that's a pretty narrow definition of a startup.

Maybe, but I didn't invent it. It's just the definition in current use. As most people use the word, it's more specific than a business that's merely new. As most people use the word, it doesn't include barber shops, gas stations, shoe repair stores, etc.
There are structural differences between that kind of company and a startup. McDonald's and Olive Garden aren't restaurants, but restaurant chains. They do things very differently from your local Italian restaurant.
Ask YC:  Doesn't twitter demonstrate that a good idea badly implemented can still succeed?
The UI in particular is surprisingly poor. And yet Twitter is successful anyway.
I bet that I'll be in that exact same position in 10 years. All of us will.
Neither: false.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=rman666
This sounds like IRC to me.
> Perhaps balancing the challenges of work and family five you a healthy dosage of time management and prioritization skills.

Plus, I don't know about you, but I have real world experience about a boatload of pitfalls that I know to avoid that I wasn't aware of 10 years ago. That is a potential source of significant efficiency.
dont worry -- we'll step forward and pick up the slack where nature has failed
You don't get to watch/listen to the video comments at your own speed. I think that's an extremely important thing we rely on when surfing.
I'm extremely curious about the methodology, even more than the results. The kind of distinction they draw seems very difficult to capture in an objective study.
Design is function, at its base. Even no design, is a design choice.
I suppose it's pretty neglected. I've been "putting it together" for the last couple years :)
The Amazon version appears to be a lot prettier than the Yahoo version.

That's gotta be worth something, though probably not an extra 5% of gross revenues.
I think that's a hijacking of the word that's not helpful at all. And I don't think that pg would argue that you can only call yourself a startup if you're going for VC funding and a sale or IPO.

If so, there's an awful lot of tech companies that have been wrongfully labeled as startups under this narrow definition. And you'd only be able to call yourself a startup in retrospect once you saw whether you ended up being a megabucks exit.

So 37signals would have been a startup if we sold to Google tomorrow, but not if we kept on as an independent company just making money?
Design Criticism: Myths and Childishness
I've set up a mirror, should be quite a bit faster ;)

http://weblava.net/ycombinator-news20080424.tar.gz
You can simply multiply your estimated revenue * .07, and see exactly how much you pay in fees. You'd have to be earning quite a lot before it becomes worth building the website in house.

Here is something else to consider: If you make a million/year, you pay 70K/year for the whole shopping website. Now, if I were earning that much, I'd rather spend my time becoming a 2 million/year business than saving 70k.

Perhaps there are equivalent products that take less money, and if the two are really apples to apples, one might pick the lower commission rate. However, if amazon were the only one out there, I think the fees could be justified for a large number of customers.
Most restaurant chains didn't start as chains, they started just as that single restaurant. Most big businesses didn't start big, they started small.

But that's again off topic. I do agree that the startup term is most frequently associated with technology companies, but you do hear about startups within a fair number of other lines of business too.
https://app.shopify.com/services/signup is very Web 2.0 pretty and reasonably priced
I have a feeling that, if I ever applied to YCombinator, my application would end up in the wastebasket the moment they caught a whiff of the fact that I have a wife and kids.

We don't ask on the application form if people have kids, nor as far as I can recall have we asked anyone in an interview. The reason most of the people we fund don't have kids is simply that most of the people who apply don't have kids.
What else are you going to do with your time? If doing things you enjoy often is wrong, call me an addict.

Looks like we have a few things in common - spring is nice but I had some great times snowboarding this winter.
Mirror: Y Combinator Dataset Of Posts
Should be quite a bit faster than the original at: http://www.xirium.com/ycombinator-news20080424.tar.gz
I'd superglue my hands.
I fully agree that different businesses require different levels of input to make it work. But this crowd seems to be mostly in the "web business" area, so I think our example is at the very least relevant.

And we're saying here's an example of a web startup that didn't follow the traditional wisdom of "long hours necessary for business success", which is offered as one data point that perhaps "long hours" isn't the success requirement as some might think it is.

Similar to the talk from SUS on Gmail's invitation system. Just because Gmail used an invitation system and had success doesn't mean that using an invitation system will give you success.

(BTW, as meta comment, I'm incredibly impressed with the level of discussion here. It's so un-web like ;). Where are all the personal insults, the trolling, and all that which we've otherwise come to accept must be part of a open-for-all comment box. Very nice job!)
Email/web/coffee/alcohol/hacking
1. yes/yes/yes/yes/yes
2. yes/yes/yes/yes/yes
3. yes/yes/yes/yes/yes
4. yes/yes/yes/yes/yes

Is this list flawed or me?
Actually most chains are started as chains. Bizarrely enough I happen to know a lot about this, because the only reading material at the Chinese restaurant near my house in Cambridge is restaurant industry trade mags.

Sometimes the chain guys will take a restaurant that's successful and turn it into a chain, but when they do this they usually keep nothing more than the name and a few recipes. McDonald's was a burger place started by the McDonald brothers, but it only became the McDonald's we know after Ray Kroc bought it and transformed it into a chain.

I agree that startups don't have to be doing technology. I don't remember saying otherwise.
Y Combinator Dataset Of Users
User data to accompany http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172701 is now available by accessing http://www.xirium.com/ycombinator-news-profile20080424.tar.gz

This dataset is 0.6MB. Some low karma users were omitted.
A solution to domain names
Those 37signals people are very, very arrogant. I don't like it. I disagree on every post they have just by reading the title.
> [...] most of the people who apply don't have kids.

how do you know if you don't ask?
Entropy Law and the Clothing Problem
That may have been true back when McDonald's started, but most of the chain restaurants around today were started as franchises.
This has already been happening. I remember seeing a story on News.YC about ads in Japan (I think) that told you what to search for instead of what site to visit. And spammers have been doing it for a couple years.
So someone is arrogant when you don't agree with them? And you don't even have to know what they're saying to make that call, you just have to read a three-word summary? What a unique path to expanding your horizon.
What then, qualifies as a startup per your definition, even in the technology space? You could say that Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo started off along the local restaurant model, selling (or providing services to) a small group of local hobbyists and expanding naturally as new opportunities presented themselves. [EDIT: In each of these businesses (except yahoo, maybe) the goal was to grow a business. I don't even know if MSFT ever took VC. They just sold product until the IPO. I doubt they saw VC or a public exit as an upfront goal. They just ran the business to the point where it was a natural progression.
One of my problems with DHH's talk was the examples he used. Starting your own restaurant is incredibly risky from a statistical standpoint. Even if you don't die in the restaurant business, you hardly make any money at all. And since this thread is ostensibly about work-life balance, the restaurant business is probably the only example DHH could have chosen where everyone works longer hours than a pg-defined startup.

Zappos was also a poor choice. It wasn't as if Zappos was a small time shoe store that decided to put up a web storefront and somehow magically scaled up its operations into a billion dollar business in the course of 5 years. Zappos was started buy a guy who had 250 million dollars from selling a software startup to Microsoft. It was specifically started to corner the online shoe market, in the same way Amazon was started to corner the online book market. It was also funded by Sequoia capital, further making it more like a "startup" startup than a DHH work-life-balance startup.
No, he might not, but getting funding of some kind is a pretty large part of the kinds of startups that they /are/ talking about, because it makes it easier to develop that massive, rapid growth that gets people's attention. Likewise, a sale or IPO aren't the only ways to derive value out of the startup, but they're the ones that get the most focus, because they're the fastest way to get the desired results (lots of money). I think that this point of view was pretty clear in several of the talks at SS08.

Do I necessarily think that that's the only kind of "startup" that exists? No, not at all. (And I'm probably gonna get busted at some point for putting words in pg's mouth.)

But, in a nutshell, no, they're not talking about the same kind of businesses you are. Others have already made this point for me (http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog/2008/04/startup-school-surfi...).

So, coming back and saying, "No, we're talking about two different approaches to the same thing!" ... well, that's not helpful.

Again, my only point is that they're talking about a very specific sort of model when they use the word "startup". If you think your model is the same thing, I wonder how you'd distinguish between a startup and a "software business", or "web venture", or whatever. (And, I think this point is getting made by other elsewhere, not just in this thread but outside of news.yc.)
That's exactly what IRC was to many people. With the death of IRC, that problem is again unsolved.
I don't think Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo started off to build small businesses with family men. These were young , extremely ambitious, single people, out to change the world.
True, I'm guessing based on the demographic similarity between the people we accept (whose circumstances I do eventually learn about) and applicants as a whole. But the median applicant does seem to be about the same as the median company we fund: a pair of guys about 25 years old.
They are probably leaving room for future easy buzz:

"Amazon WebStore drops fee by 14%!!!" (from 7% to 6%)

They can do this 4 or 5 times.
This turns out to be easy to research; just start from the R&I 400 list of chains and go read their corporate histories. If you were in business for many years before opening up satellite locations, we can safely say you weren't started as a chain.

You're right; restaurants conceived as chains dominate the top of the list, with some very notable exceptions, including KFC, Starbucks, and Subway.

Something else that the top of that list shares in common is that they were lucrative for their investors.

Something else that they share is that they are all crappy. Look how far down that list you have to go before you hit something you'd actually choose freely? In-N-Out is #89.
Indeed. iminlikewithyou is already pretty close to 67.192.37.226

I'd like it to be a bit more formal, with institutional support for the forward naming. Otherwise, awkward company names will only become more common :)
This looks like an excellent way to acquire customers if you already have your own site. 7% of the initial purchase is actually pretty cheap for a recent single buyer. If you purchase a list, rent a list, or use SEO, then junk mail or email blast (for shame), by the time you figure out your conversion rate, you'd be way ahead with WebStore.

Unless I'm reading the docs wrong, your items appear in the search results for amazon.com. This is very powerful because these are active buyers at the world's largest on-line retailer.

The trick is, once you convert a buyer (who is now your buyer), you want to direct them to your site from now on so you only have to pay the 7% once. You also want to put your loss leaders on WebStore and keep your high margin items on your own site. After all, 7% of a lower price is a lower commission.
37Signals didn't start off to build a small business; they keep score with revenue, not headcount, like the rest of the real world.
Ask YC: What Blogging Software do you use?
If your blogging software is mentioned, vote for it otherwise add it to the list.
Software development processes, as "corporate" as they may appear, are absolutely necessary in any professional development environment. A team, no matter how talented, has to maintain some sort of organization in order to succeed. No offense, but if you don't believe me, you've never written a project big enough to matter.

It's good to see companies move away from waterfall and toward agile strategies, though. They're more representative of the real development process.
I don't think that'll work at all. Instead of competing for presence in domain names, squatters will simply compete for presence in keywords and phrases. Getting a user to a specific website could become kinda challenging.

As one example, in my soon-to-end part-time job, I had to ask a user almost every day to go to "www.whatismyip.com". Occasionally they would type this into their search bar instead of their URL bar, and would magically end up at something that wasn't helpful at all. (When I try it, it works, but who knows what they're typing.)

This would just move the problem of competition for recognition to a new area.
Yahoo! became a business by accident. Apple was started by a guy who wanted to make the best personal computers, and Microsoft was started by a guy who wanted to put a computer in every home and on every desktop.

In the Apple/Microsoft initial period, there were plenty of smaller competitors who wanted to slowly sell stuff to hobbyists and "expand naturally" and none of those companies exist anymore.
Firstly, that would require installing it :). Secondly, this is being served by a very old server which, from empirical testing, wouldn't cope with this type of protocol. Thirdly, I have to keep borrowed bandwidth to a manageable level during business hours, which ideally means making it tend to zero in the long term. I was anticipating a mirror to continue serving this data but it would have been rude to ask.

Anyhow, I was expecting at most 20 concurrent connections before traffic decayed. I wasn't expecting concurrent connections from 56 unique IP addresses. The server is in London and it is transferring 1.7MB/s, mostly to European users. However, latency and routing to US clients seems to drastically reduce throughput to those users.

Most of the HTTP 206 [Partial] requests seem to be from Internet Explorer, despite this being a relatively obscure choice on this forum. I can only suppose that IE is quite inclined to re-establish connections after a connection briefly stalls. The latter would be because the httpd state creeped 39MB into virtual memory on this 64MB RAM server. This would also be why TCP window scaling didn't occur.

Anyhow, I knew it was risky to use this server to serve relatively large files but it will be used in the future for posting smaller tidbits.
Not for nothing, but for a hiring manager, asking this question is a firing offense. So is age, marital status, religion, or even any question about place of residence apart from "are you capable of being on-site during core hours".

From a lot of unfortunate experience: tech people suck at following these rules.
I disagree about Twitter. I don't think the UI is really all that poor. It's not revolutionary, but it's not bad, and it does the job.
Actually, our primary metric is profit. But you're otherwise completely correct. We're interested in growing profit, growing customers, and growing influence the best we can.

If that happens to lead to a billion-dollar company, awesome. But the odds of business tells us that's probably not overly likely, so we're making sure we'll be happy even if that doesn't happen.

(Who knew merely being satisfied with millions -- single, tens, or even hundreds -- would sound like a humble goal in this context.)
I use 7.10 with an external monitor and laptop. The standard display tools did not work for me, as they kept stuffing up the resolutions of each monitor, so the best solution I found was to have 2 xorg.conf files, one for 2 monitors and one for just the laptop. I run a script to swap them around when I need to. Not the best solution ... but it works for me. Took me about 4 hours or so to setup, as I've not used linux before.
Spammers already do compete for keywords and phrases - its called SEO.

I sort of do what the post suggests: if I want to go to wikipedia, I just type 'wikipedia'. Works for a lot of sites.
According to Graham, "getting funded" isn't even a part of the plan for most YC startups.
Success is All in a Day's Work
Action Aggregate (poem about social network data aggregation)
It is crazy to think that the perceived odds of building a billion-dollar company are less for a small established team already making millions of dollars than they are for a 3-month old team with $20,000 in the bank. But people do perceive the world that way.
And exactly how are you supposed to tell your customers the name of your site? It might not be there next month if someone out-SEO's you.

And no "check my great site over at 239.263.137.852" isn't quite catchy enough.
Yes. That position is known in the social sciences as your prime earning years.
I try just to use standard definition. A startup as most people use the word means a comparatively small, comparatively young company that is designed to grow very big. Most but not all such companies create technology, because technology scales so well.

Basically, the difference between a small business and a startup is like the difference between a shrub and a redwood seedling.

The metaphor isn't perfect, because occasionally companies are transformed from one to the other. But this is extraordinarily rare.
I'll admit, DHH coming into Hacker News is a breath of fresh air, even if a few of the 20-somethings here (including myself) can sniff out the psuedo-defeatist , "statistically its not possible" scent it is tinged with. I think, on the whole of things, pg isn't out to attract the type of people that want to start the types of business DHH is talking about.

I think pg is set out to do the same thing VC's do (invest in outlandish, maybe crazy ideas), albeit with a focus on extremely good hackers and with a fraction of the budget.

What DHH seems to be implying is that you should focus on building something that you can get paid for, right away, and throw away the big dreams. Which is pretty much the opposite of pg.
I don't necessarily feel that the UI is poor, it's the Product Management that sucks. So many features they should have but don't. But I guess they benefit from the fact that lots of developers take the reigns and make their own stuff that uses Twitter.
Blogger for personal, Typepad for business.
Portal/Rickroll Cake
Hmm. So, it might work for specific cases, just not generically.

Maybe it's time for the search engines to support a "certainty" statistic, an algorithm which calculates the probability that the top result is what the user is looking for, based on a combination of the user's search request and the linking for the top result.
pg has been specifically keeping the definition of "startup" narrow

Argh. I haven't been doing anything to the definition of the word. I'm just using it as everyone does. Think about newspaper headlines, for example. Wouldn't you be surprised if a company described in a headline as a "startup" turned out to be a shoe repair shop, or Exxon?
heh -- you did leave an open invitation for the trolls :)
Could you defend your argument with evidence? Here's an example of company that "transformed": Microsoft.

Also, with only minimal snark intended: you're saying 37Signals is a "shrub"?
Comprehensive video overview of Amazon Web Services (AWS)
I wrote my own shell script for taking a directory containing posts and rendering my blog.
It wasn't an argument, it was a metaphor... :-/
37signals is a case in point. They're currently the #1 Google hit for the words "basecamp", "backpack", "highrise", and "campfire", despite not owning a single one of those domains.
Take a look at Go Daddy's Quick Shopping Cart (https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/ecommerce/cart.asp?ci=9032). You have to pay a % to the payment processor, but the product is a fixed fee.
I don't think the idea that the UI alone being "poor" means it was badly implemented. Maybe you can elaborate more of how it was "badly implemented".
Three have that I know of.
The aggressive response of the CEO surprised me. It was a departure from the "customer is always right" approach that so many corporate representatives use that rarely rings true to me. While I'm not sure I'd be pleased with his tone if Comscore's success or failure impacted me directly, it was somewhat refreshing.

The referenced misuse of Comscore's data reminds me of some criticism of Wikipedia. Critics claim that one can't rely on Wikipedia to be accurate. Yet, if accuracy is important to you, you should check and review the sources which are provided toward the bottom of almost every article. Researchers requiring accuracy pursued primary sources before Wikipedia, and they still need to pursue them today. Regarding a secondary source as accurate without verifiying it is misuse, just as relying on Comscore's data on Google's domestic performance to project overall international corporate performance was misuse.
I have used WordPress(.org) & MoveableType.

Of the two WordPress is by far my favorite. The caching helps it scale nearly as well as MoveableType and there are a lot more themes, a ton of plugins, and a very active community to help with anything you need.

Also WP is written with PHP and is a breeze to setup. MT is Perl and most people who aren't hackers tend to get scared away from the config files.
Developer welcome mat