skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, thanks to the management for hosting a fabulous event. That was the most entertaining day I've had in a long time. I'd like to add some additional comments to Mr. Arrington's:

- Although Jeff Bezos didn't directly comment on Google App Engine, he did an awful lot of indirect commenting, by way of pointing out features of AWS that are noticeably absent from Google App Engine.

- After the day was done, I overheard some folks who sounded bored and disappointed by Peter Norvig's talk, which focused on the application of large data sets and machine learning to practical problems. I was shocked by the reaction, as it seemed to me that Norvig was basically giving us a roadmap for (a) finding interesting problems and (b) solving them. Short of writing a check, I'm not sure what else he could have done for the audience.

- Am I the only one who thinks it's funny - and a sad comment on the software development community - that technical conferences always have the most technical problems?

- Paul Buchheit is Bob Newhart. And I mean that as a compliment.
Omnisio.com also recorded. They'll have it up shortly.
Another highlight: Arrington's desktop.

(Did anybody get a good shot of what was on there?)
"HackerTV is proud to be broadcasting Startup School, an all-day event that takes place on April 19th and teaches you everything you could ever want to know about technology startups"

that's a very hefty statement "everything you could ever want to know"
WoW a Starbucks should buy this and create small boutiques where you get to see various chocolates being made and have chocolate like wine tasting sessions. Heck throw the wine in!

Maybe that's where dude is going with this Tcho; create retail stores. Great idea! Im hungry now!
Poll: Best speaker at Startup School 2008?
If you were are today's Startup School, whose talk did you find the most valuable/impressive/useful?
Sam Altman
Marc Andreessen
Michael Arrington
Jeff Bezos
Paul Buchheit
David Lawee
Jack Sheridan
Greg McAdoo
Peter Norvig
Wisconsin Sucks for Startups
It is damn near impossible to start a startup outside a 'startup hub', but I'm going to attempt the impossible this summer. Around here, mentioning to friends that I'm going to do a startup usually entails a detailed description of a new landscaping business. Software and technology are completely oblivious in the minds of my fellow Wisconinites. Software development and website design lays in the hands of the few professional web firms at a very steep price. I was quoted a total of $30,000 to create the type of website I want. It doesn't include any innovative software programming. The site is by no means a simple task, but in no way is it too difficult for an experienced firm.

My question to you guys is whether or not it is worth it. I've read all the blogs and am constantly up to date on YC news. The trends suggest that there is a high demand for it, but the risk is quite significant. I have no co-founder and I expect to graduate college by next May. I'm just a kid chasing clouds. Is the risk worth the reward??
Are there simpler and more dependable ways of doing this than creating a startup?
Everyone has a genetic limit. I'm not going to bench press 700 pounds. Therefore the set of all things I could do (naturally) in my lifetime to raise it has a least upper bound. QED:)

There's a time for intensity. As someone starts to get diminishing returns, the needs increase for higher intensity, probably higher volume, and higher complexity e.g. periodization or something even more complicated than that. The time for intensity is not when you are just starting weight training, in which case anything will work (but someone should do exercises properly of course.) The time for intensity is doubly not when your primarily goal is to lose weight, in which case the body isn't going to have its full resources to repair itself.
Whoops, sorry, I thought he counted those that got acquired into the other size 57 bucket.
where's the damn video?
The Future Of Social Networking - Consolidation or Mass Customization?
This title triggered a fairly intense repressed memory here. Something about Quake, telephone modems, and grenade launchers...
YC applications (an improvement suggestion)
I was just thinking it'd be nice to still have access to these even after winners/losers have been decide, for our own purposes, or maybe early work for the next round.

Anyone else think this would be a good idea?
trac sucks. Why? It's obviously a pita to configure. Because I've never seen a trac setup work right the first time. Most of the time I either can't create an account to file bugs, or I can't create bugs even though I've filed them. I've never seen trac set up right the first time.

Bugzilla must be better as it generally works.

Lighthouse is confusing ( can't figure out what project I'm filing for. If I file for the wrong one it can't be changed, and where is the search again?)

Mantis is supposedly good. Never needed to use a mantis setup though.
so its not worth watching for 25 minutes, but you're going to have a dialog based on the transcript? (Which doesn't really fully capture what he was talking about) That makes no sense.
Hey, thanks for the advice. I got one email from someone who recognized me who said, "Are you on crack cocaine?" but he's a lawyer.

Including my friends' votes, the tally is 7 Positives and 5 Negatives. The developer is from Europe, so the longest he can stay here on a travel visa is 3 months for education and training purposes. And, by law, I can't pay him.

According to several people, I need a technical cofounder. The startup is a risk, time is money - and I have a solid working relationship with this guy. His willingness to come out here from Europe is a huge vote of confidence, so I'm veering towards yes.

I appreciate everyone's stories suggestions for the kinds of details that need to be worked out. If for some reason things go south, I'll repost here with lessons learned. Thanks again for the input.
How to get things done
Given that you're about to be freshly-minted college grad, it seems to me the worst thing that can happen is that one year from now you'll have a little credit card debt, with a year's experience worth ten times that which you'd get at American Conglomerated Megacorp.

I assume you're in Madison. If so, there are good hackers to be found (Raven Software, for one). Connect with them, if only for moral support.
check justin tv archive
Python Decorators: Wonderful and beautiful syntactic sugar
Why must DHH be so hhot?
DHH Startup School 2008 Talk [Video]
Startup School 2008: Impressions.
I experienced some herky-jerky technical problems while viewing that, even though it was buffered up.
Smalltalk programmers extend built-in classes all the time. Learning that changed my perspective on this question.
video courtesy of justin.tv: http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97862/DHH_Talk__Startup_School...
does anyone have an AVI avaible for this? i am having problems with te FLV download at Justin.tv (no sound)....
Have you fully quantified the risk and the reward? If not, that's your first priority. Here is some food for thought:

1. If you farm out your website, there is a significant risk that you will spend some or all of the $30K and it will not come out the way you want or even be useable. Ensure you go with a reputable firm with a portfolio of sites that you can actually check out yourself. This is not the time to farm out an idea to a freelance programmer no matter how good s/he is. Just trust me on this (I was once of those freelance programmers!).

2. If things turn out not so bleak from having outsourced the work, chances are that it will be over budget and late. So ensure you have contingency plans (e.g., maybe it will take 1 year instead of 4 months, and $60K instead of $30K to get done).

3. If you aren't in a startup hub, and you aren't in a program like startup school, then your support system is going to be essentially non-existent. This is a very very bad thing. I tried to start a business right out of school in such a situation (and with the tech economy in the gutter) and let me tell you it was very difficult. I got a salaried job for a few years to re-group and am back on my own two feet. You will want to seek out lots of mentors (not online, I mean people you can phone up, have meals with to chat, etc.) and do lots of networking. And even then it might not be enough. One of the great things about being in a place where there's lots of business going on is that you can't go very far without randomly bumping into folks that you might be able to help. For instance, I did a presentation last Friday and afterward two great things happened:

i) A gentleman introduced himself as somebody who worked for the investment arm of the biggest bank in Canada and asked me if I'd be interested in partnering on a project with them. Just right out of the blue. I didn't have to do anything and in fact wasn't even shopping my company around. I was just there to present the results of a project we did for a client.

ii) One of the directors on the board of my client company spoke about a PR campaign that he was initiating and I soon realized that another company that I've worked with would be an amazing fit for him to partner with. Afterwards, I approached him, told him about that company, we exchanged cards and he asked me to email him with the details.

Basically, this sort of thing is bound to happen a lot less frequently in smaller communities (in both overall population and in terms of industry size). You would be surprised how much businesses rely on luck. Luck really is the intersection where preparedness meets opportunity. If you're in a big city that has a lot of folks doing what you're doing, then a lot of times opportunities just randomly present themselves like they did last Friday for me (and my friends at that other company). It's just statistics.
StartUp School 08 Corridor Conversation with DHH
Never heard of this ning thing before.
justin.tv is slow for me :( i want to download the entire thing and then view it offline.
Hey, you know what? I'm not particularly interested in having a conversation about DHH's company. His company runs fine without my input. I'm also not particularly interested in faithfully replicating all of DHH's ideas. That's why my eyes aren't glued to the screen every time he talks. I'm glad he has an audience. I like him. But I've got a pipeline to help manage. So really, and I'm asking you, Jamie, who gives a shit?

My point was, don't snipe at some guy who took the time to write up notes from the talk because his hero worship wasn't total enough to prevent him from doing me a favor. I'm sorry he folded up your favorite player's rookie card and stuck it in his BMX spokes --- that must drive you nuts --- but that writeup gave me a useful idea. I'm going to make a judgement call that says that watching some Flash video of DHH talking isn't going to be worth the billable 25 minutes.
when you're done filling them out, click file > print then click print to pdf. i've kept all the ones i've sent in since it's not that hard to just copy and paste even.

don't think yc holds on to the applications; might be a liability issue.
small suggestion - can you guys make it easy to save the image. from cursory look, when i tried to save one of the images i was in, i had to type out the url.
When people ask me why I think I can do this, the fact that I built and run portsnap is something I often mention -- of course, 50k people using a free service for updating FreeBSD is different from people paying me to store their backups, but at least it demonstrates that I (a) can build a system which scales into the TB/month range, and (b) am able to "make something which people want". I also developed quite a few ideas while working on portsnap which I'm now using in tarsnap... hence the similarity in naming. :-)

But you're quite right about people being impressed by open source credentials -- I've had a few emails along the lines of "I only have a vague notion of what you're doing with tarsnap, but I've seen enough of your FreeBSD work to know that anything you do is likely to be good -- so let me know if you're looking for investment". So far these
have all gotten a polite "thanks, but I'm not looking for funding right now" reply, of course.
Paul Graham's talk almost made me want to cry. It starts about 1/3 of the way. Go watch it. And remember, be good.
Another question, has anyone made any money off a facebook app or myspace, etc.? I'm not convinced that providing entertainment services would be monitizable period. Thus you add value for them, spend money on servers, get 100k users, that pay you nothing.
What Lisp & Assembly instill
That's a little creepy. It seems like Paul spoke about the "be good" tactic because that tactic works, not because it's emotionally appealing.
You're right. I just assumed that if it wasn't a girl, I would be corrected. But you're right, I should err on the side of caution.
I couldn't make out anything interesting. There was a Word document called "FINAL draft FINAL final" though, which I chuckled at.
that's terrible it was clear that he was excited to ask him a question, and he knew what to ask him about. rockets. mars bitches
Hey, Ev, nice event rundown. I didn't know you were here for the event. Sorry I missed meeting you. Look me up if you're still here during the week.
Startup School: Great Variety of Speakers
I think you've missed the point. The point is not to settle for the middle, the point is that there are real everyday problems that need solving, and there's real success that can naturally come from solving those problems, overtime. You can't force success or simply will it.

I appreciated how he positioned "startups" in the same realm as other "regular" businesses; that's a very honest view because at the end of the day every business (tech startup or Italian restaurant) is judged by the profits they generate by creating value for their customers. Thats what a business does, 1 + 1 = 3, adding valuing. As a business owner you can't escape that law of commerce and expect to survive. Tech startups aren't a special class of business in and of themselves that deserve to be valued higher than other businesses, they're only special if they can grow more efficiently and operate at a higher margin than other businesses.
Are most of the entrepreneurs here not introverts? I remember seeing a personality type question, and quite a few were Is of one sort or another.
Tell YC: Thanks for Startup School
I'm not asking anything, I'm telling.

I just wanted to say thanks for organizing this event. Coming from outside the valley, it's a little harder to get access to learn from such high-profile people.

I had a wonderful time connecting with different people and hearing their stories and startups. Good luck to everyone I talked to that have YC interviews!

Thanks again YCombinator and everyone who made it possible. I had a great time and learned a lot.
I'll give you that "failed an IQ test" seems a bit harsh. But when did all this occur? 2005, or later? If later, there's been so much written on the web about this that it seems amazing to me that you would have been shocked by the offer.

To the second point, I agree with you that an assembly line style makes individual negotiations impossible. But I'd say two things: (a) that's a feature, not a bug, and (b) if you're a young founder with no track record, exactly what are your other options?
Half of that video is background chatter while they try to setup AV before and between presentations, most of which are missing. While I enjoyed listening to pg describe the moles on Trevor's head, I'd rather listen to the full talks!
Facebook breaks all applications
Smalltalk a good option?
Hello guys,
lately I've been more and more interested in smalltalk, I believe that both DabbleDB and auctomatic have their systems built on top of squeak, but is it pratical to build web app (which depend on a lot of out of the box libraries, for image processing and web crawling) in smalltalk?
Bugzilla must be better as it generally works.

Mantis is supposedly good.

I can't even explain to you how hard these two suck.

If you think Trac is a PITA, try either of the above. I have. There's a reason Trac was written.

Follow the docs and it works right. People who don't follow the instructions manage to fuck it up, but what else is new?
For at least the last 2 hours, users haven't been able to add any applications. If you're developing for Facebook (like me!), please vote for the bug (see link). And if you work at facebook, please fix it!
I recorded the talks on mini-dv video tapes. I don't have the time or equipment to edit and post them unfortunately. However, I'll gladly send them to anyone who would like to do it. I can host the video files and add them to the Startup School podcast feed on FeedBurner. Email me at matt.jaynes@gmail.com if interested!
That link has only a part (about 1 hour and 45 min) of the morning's talks. To see all the talks on justin.tv, go to the hackterv channel archive: http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/archive

The full day's video is broken up into segments and the beginning of a lot of talks are missing. Almost all of David Lawee's talk is missing.

I was too sick to go, even though I got accepted, so having this video is some solace. Thanks justin.tv.

Looking forward to the omnisio version to fill in the gaps.
My first thought was how much this sounds like "All my friends are using Facebook while I secretly am using Ning." A social network's not very helpful if you're the only one on there. ;-)

But the network effects are far different for app developers than for users. Good luck, let us know how it goes!
What turns people off about Smalltalk is it doesn't talk to the rest of the world the way you're used to so it takes getting used to.

You're certainly not going to have much luck using Smalltalk for prototyping novel image processing algorithms.
Sorry about that, I accidentally downmodded you. I guess there is no undo here. (I modded up some of your other comments to make up for the karma loss. But it sucks that I can't just undo it :( )
I was quoted a total of $30,000 to create the type of website I want.

That's odd----all the websites I've owned costs zero. Oh, right, I made them myself.
FWIW, I think Seaside with Magritte is The Way (tm) to do web apps. But you're not going to find many libraries with Smalltalk. My recommendation is to just port those to another language, then use that :)

I'm currently working on a port of Magritte to Perl called Ernst, and a new web framework called Kiiteh. Both are very in-progress right now, so I don't recommend even imagining that they exist. In a few months, though, that will be the One True Way. Decent language, phenomenal library support, and a nice way of easily writing web apps. :)
it seems like this is fixed
Yep, looks like they fixed it about half an hour ago.
Something about this bug makes me just desperately want to close it as "worksforme", but I'm speaking as a facebook user rather than a facebook developer :-)
It's on Valleywag...
Decent job of compacting the 9 hours into a few paragraphs.
$30K is too much. It will be too painful a lesson if does not pan out. There are less expensive options. I suggest you contact some of the people involved in setting up BarCamp Milwaukee 1 & 3, Web414, and maybe Silicon Pastures. (Google them). There is not a lot of support for entrepreneurs in Wisconsin. The city and state will tell you there is, but that's a lot of talk. The best options for support (emotional, ideas, financial, etc.) come from grass roots sources, at least here.
The great thing about this event was not only the quality of speakers, but the wide range of topics they spoke on. I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much all of them.

Overall it was an excellent event. Except that one annoying guy who kept asking the speakers "questions" that ended up being rather ridiculous advice.
I involuntary used that technique to stop playing WOW. Some time ago I decide to better organize my gaming schedule so I thought that first thing in the morning should be 2h of gaming. After two weeks I started procrastinating on my gaming duties until I was completely disgusted by and abandoned the game :)

Interesting how when something becomes to much of an obligation it lose it's recreational value.
Yeah, I was one of the multitudes that applauded when Jessica finally reminded him that there was a line behind him.
Professional web firms' prices are high everywhere. Since you're new to website business(?) they could even try to shut you off by setting the price even higher. That way they wouldn't need to actually implement your custom build site. And if you would take the offer they would atleast get some nice profits.

I work in this business as a employee of a professional web firm and a freelancer. I have come across a lot of clients that think they know what they want but actually don't. You should know that when you want something custom build, its going to cost you, by the hour and more.

1. Write clear specs. If you know software development you should know how to write clear specs. Try to drop features that are not important. There is a lots of stuff that could go wrong, besides the site, so could it work with less features?

2. Freelance designers are actually good. Find one that you like and provide the layout for the web firm, so the firm will only do the technical side and you will probably save some bucks.

3. Do as much as you can by yourself. Draw the basic structure of a site in powerpoint/gimp or whatever. Just some boxes that show eg. where is navigation, header, news, some featured products etc. Draw all the different pages and try to write or draw how the site should work.

4. You don't need to use a Wisconsian web firm. It's not like there is lots of shipping involved. If you want to discuss the deal in person, a cost of few airline tickets probably isn't too much if you can get better deal.
The Perfect Desktop - Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) With KDE
Is there a reason you aren't buiding the web site yourself? If you are not a developer what is the value you bring to the proposed startup? ( I am NOT being sarcastic. This is an honest question)