skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a similar thought long time back about an online radio station that would allow people to set their own song lineup. An user could access the library and he or she could push that song to be aired. This way one could air a song and make others listen to. I dont know why any online radio model like this could be connected to stream like an physical station. Charge the users a kind of flat rate per month and let them select and air songs
Adding features is not the mistake; the mistake is adding features 'just because you can'. Moreover, I can think of some wonderful products that have a lot of features, but they went through a design process wherein the creators knew how to add depth, and consequently they're still usable; too many people add features thinking only in terms of horizontal exposure--i.e. every new feature requires a new button, rather than in depth--i.e. new features get attached to the product's existing skeleton, and appear only when they're needed (and promptly disappear when they're not).

To go one step further: I don't think a product can have too many well-implemented features. How many features should a pencil have? A fighter jet? How many features would be too many for the pencil? How many features would be too many for the fighter jet? Raw feature count doesn't bother me a bit; features that get in the way (noise) are what frustrate me.
10 tips to a successful B2B direct mail sales letter and marketing campaign
Originally I was going to pose the question: Why do people want to cut other people's source of revenue?

But the answer came back to me just as quickly: Because they can.

But can they? One theory for the startup world might be: No matter what your product is, you need to have barriers to entry.

I'll think on it.. It seems to be worth considering how one might actively place barriers of entry so that others can't just copy you.
Technorati Searching for CEO, Looking for Buyers
CrazyEgg - Measuring Web Site Usability (who needs a lab?)
I am becoming very intrigued by the combination of real estate + venture capital
What's such a class other than search?
Sun's StartupCamp 2
May 7, 2007 in San Francisco (just before JavaOne (good or bad :-))

Also note that it's being run more or less as an Open Space conference.
the $250 for rent and wifi is determined by the market in NYC, and other major cities. It sounds like you could have even lower cost in Columbus, but the most important thing is setting up a high performance environment for startups to get together, work on their projects, and benefit from the input of others.
My lease runs out in June... maybe i can sleep there?
The Magic Lamp
'Goal setting for people who hate setting goals'
- Keith Ellis

its not self help for slackers :-) its just a really good book about organizing your goals and seeing them through.
Unfunded? Unless your credit is totally in the toilet, you can probably get a business credit line to launch on your own
While the original post may have been a bit off target it certainly set off a very interesting comment conversation. The post has been thoroughly critiqued here, but I did want to add on thing that came to mind as I was reading through the discussion.

YC is a model that was created based on expereince and success. The value of YC funding is not the money, $5-20 k is not hard to save or raise.

It has been encouraging and interesting to hear from so many people, who obviously find a lot of value in VC's approach, offering slight variances based on their personal situation.

It is important to take what is valuable from a model and apply it to your own startup situation. If you can implement the use the best concepts and models from other and apply them to your unique startup, you will reduce the chance of failure and save a ton of time and money.

If you fallow blindly and base your success on one groups acceptance your not an entrepreneur.
I call the bullshit on this.

It's 51 minutes of silence. Anyway I've put it up if anyone can hear anything:
http://www.ijigg.com/songs/DC0DEDAPA4

Late April Fools? Gosh I hate this month.
This is great for people already living in NYC who want to leverage some of the great startup-environment benefits present in other cities.

$200-$250/month for a cubicle, wifi, and a bunch of like-minded people really isn't so bad, relative to most NYC living/working expenses.

If I end up getting angel funding and not YC, I will probably take him up on it.
Optimizing Page Load Time - die.net
We've got a projector (from Woot), so our nightly dvd/video game breaks are pretty awesome.
That's a great example, and illustrates exactly why I disagree with you ;)

If you design things to be simple and expandable, you don't NEED to keep adding features in order to give the functionality people have.

A Pencil has a certain set of features. It can write, it can erase.

It has other things it can do because of its design- It can act as a piece of wood, so it can be used to push things on the table, or used as Lincoln Logs.. But they don't need to ADD anything to support these uses.

You can decide tomorrow to use a pencil for things the developers never thought of- You can use it to trace leads, or use it to build a fort. You can use it to hold two things apart from one another, or use the eraser to hold pins..

These aren't features that needed to be added. No adjustments to the pencil are necessary to support fort-building. They're new and clever ways of using what's already there.

THAT's what you want to encourage. Find ways to create services that can be used in ways you never imagined.

APIs are a great example of that, but there's more that can be done. Make thing simple. Let people add their own uses for things and they'll do amazing things.
I'm no expert but I distinctly remember Rahoul Seth say at Startup School NOT to fund with debt in the early stages. Fund with equity and try to stay debt free until after the seed and 1st VC round.
The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber - its all about vision, systems, and building a business that can scale.

Small Giants by Bo Burlingham
For Lispers: How accurate is this portrait of Lisp?
Being primarily a microsoft developer, I'm probably in the minority here. My coworker and I have been talking about branching out and learning completely different languages to stay fresh and learn some different views.

It took me 3 read throughs of this article to begin to get a sense of what makes people rave about LISP. I've also read Chapter 2 of PG's book. From what I can see, I like.

I'm not saying I'm a convert (yet!) but I absolutely plan on reading Paul's book and working through the examples and excercises there.

In the meantime, is the article a good way to think about Lisp?
Off the top of my head, I'd think that the UI would be of secondary importance in any startup that is writing systems software: if you can solve an important business problem, a fancy demo is impressive (and important!), but the basic problem you're solving often doesn't require a UI. For example, enterprise data integration (conversion between data stored in heterogeneous formats and systems), or natural language translation/processing. Many startups in information management / data warehousing: if you build a Teradata killer, the UI is certainly a component of your product, but it is pretty secondary. A startup building hardware (say, networking stuff) might not need to pay much attention to the UI, depending on the target market. etc.

If by "startup" you just mean "implementing the Web 2.0 idea-of-the-week", then yeah, I agree UI is usually pretty important.
Scribd question: Is there something like Adobe Reader's #page= ?
With Adobe Reader, you can jump to a page like this:

http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2005/CMU-CS-05-193.pdf#page=69

Is there a way to do this using Scribd?
2 things to keep in mind:

It is in the interest of seed funders to encourage you not to fund yourself with debt. They want to ride the gravy train if you succeed.

It is in your interest not to fund yourself with debt. All probability suggests that there is no gravy train for you, just debt.
To Applicants: Has Y Combinator looked at your demo?
How do you explain the fact that the pencils I buy today are a lot more sophisticated, more comfortable, and have more features (refillable lead, advancing the lead via shaking) than the pencils I bought 10 years ago? The cost of a simple pencil is like $0.05. The pencils I buy are almost $10.00 each + lead + erasers. I like the $10.00 pencil guys' business plan a lot more than the $0.05 pencil guys' plan.
The evolution of the Internet is constantly being challenged by creationists-Its sort of brilliant marketing (Komisar) to act as though as of your investees has a great idea it warrants another web phase (3.0?). True, no product campaign these days is complete without a rebranding of the web itself.

As advertising has undergone a power shift, from the content providers to the users, advertising has somehow become a bad word. Now that end users decide what and how products will be pitched, advertising seems to stand not only for traditional, flashy, in-your-face ads, but for any product communication that has already occurred. In that sense, advertising is perpetually over, and therefore always omnipresent.

Simply put, as more and more people research products and services online, making purchasing decisions online, and actually buy online, it seems preposterous to claim that advertising, and companies that are in the business of advertising, are in anyway passe. It is inconsistent with the evolution of the web.

What I like about Komisar-backed Aggregate Knowledge is that it is creating the platform for some wonderful advertising streams. Right now, as I understand it, they are touting as part of their product targeting by the Psychology of Crowds, or the beginning of building psychological profiles of buyers. This is done on many shopping sites: If person 1 buys product A, then he will, based on group research, be interested in product B and product C and should be presented with B and C in a non-obtrusive fashion.
What this should naturally evolve into is a better targeting-being able to differentiate between types of buyers; is she an impulse buyer that might be wooed by a flashy interface, or is she a research shopper, who needs a case study to buy? Merely providing relevant content, without the proper packaging for the individual (what I think to be the advertising formerly know as advertising) is deficient.
Also, what is the ideal interface complexity of this shopper? For instance, in person people buy less in big stores because they are overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. They are more likely to buy products in a smaller store. People are more influenced by items placed at the front of the store as their shopping goals are more malleable as they enter. Not to say that these findings will translate directly to shopping behavior on the web, but we will soon have the ability to create the perfect shopping environment for an individual, and advertising will be big part of it.
This is an interesting application. But, your demo video does not do it justice: (a) It is too long; (b) your folders that you use in the video have too many files in them; you say about 10x more words than necessary; and (d) your voice, combined with the bad microphone input, make the explanation sounds pad.

Your main competition is not USB drives: it is HotMail, GMail, and Yahoo! Mail. Once people are taught the "email it to yourself" trick, they love to use it--I think because it is not so intuitive for people, yet it is so simple, that they are proud that they are doing something so clever.
Software for the World
I'm also looking for "No"'s as well as "Yes"'s. So if they haven't, please speak up! :)
submitted separately
Shhhhh, patience is a virtue.
This the funniest thing I've ever read on news.yc.
reddit variation: top instead of hot, random instead of new, vote up to discuss, vote down when done
The article is too verbose. Somewhat ironic since the author prefers LISP for its succinctness :P
Do you think this variation on reddit would be interesting?

- the front page would be like reddit's top

- instead of a new page, there's a random page that shows links in completely random order (each refresh shows a new random order)

- vote up if you want to bring a link to the front page

- vote down when you want a link to disappear from the front page (e.g., you don't like it or you like it but don't want to see any more discussion on it)
I have nothing against adding features that make sense, and are refinements of the workflow.

Adding a comfortable pad to a pencil makes it easier to use, and is certainly worth a bit extra to people. Adding replaceable erasers adds more, and so on.

Those are potentially useful features, and they don't get in the way of people using the pencil.

This is the sort of refining that should always go on. How can we make things easier for our users. How can we streamline their workflow.

Part of the problem in adding feature comes when you start adding features which make the base case harder. When users start to look at the vast sums of things that CAN be done, and you lose the simplicity of the tool.

Another problem is that adding features allows people to hack things, in ways that are more complex than they should be, and cause user-frustration.

Let me give you an example-

There was a small company I knew that kept its data in a series of excel files. They were small, and it was a quick and easy to keep track of what they were doing.

As the company started to grow, they started needing more and more complex reports on the data, and were running into the limitations of what they could easily do.

They started working with heavy scripting in Excel, using VBA scripts to copy data from one sheet to another, and to replicate it to backup excel files.

Eventually they had a mess of files talking to one another, doing CSV exports, then parsing them and creating new files, and the like. It worked.. Kinda.. But it was kludgey, and complex.

The problem was that they kept adding new features to their excel documents, rather than accepting that excel was Great at what it did [1], but it wasn't the right solution for them any more.

Eventually, if I recall, they finally got it all moved over to a series of Access databases, which made things a lot nicer.

Could Microsoft add features to Excel to make it easier for them to keep pushing it? Sure..

Should they? In this case, probably not. The features you adding need to make sense for the tool.

[1] For the sake of discussion, anyway ;)
Measuring success, in what units?! The revenue in dollars or millions?
You are a victim of YC's marketing. First of all, if you don't need their money, don't sell part of your company to them. And, if you do need their money, don't make it so obvious or you'll have no room to negotiate the equity you are selling them: people keep saying $15,000 for 6% but those are just averages--the equity range I have heard about was 1.5%-12%. I think you would be a 12%-er for sure.

If I had a good idea that I believed in, I would go to my friends and family and ask them to loan me $2,000 a month for eight months. If I succeeded, I would pay them back their money + interest + whatever I felt like giving them as a gift. If I failed, I would get a real job and pay them back in a few months time.
The random page could also take into account the link score so that links with higher scores have a better chance of ranking more highly.
And how would we know if they have?
Check your web server logs (or whatever traffic measurement tool you have) to see if the links you sent have been requested.
and interestingly enough, it seems that activeCollab found it much harder to clone than initially thought.

from the web site, "activeCollab is still under heavy development, but you can download activeCollab 0.7.1 and give it a test run."
"real life" by Me
I have sent my links to several people.
That's upto you to decide. Takeaway from this post is to define your units and be dead honest with yourself and your investors about where you stand and where you are headed.

-Zaid
ShowClix takes on TicketMaster
Oddly enough, I can't tell. It seems to be a portrait expressed in terms of the broken reinventions of the Lisp wheel that currently occupy the median programmer's head. Sort of like describing a car as a "horseless carriage." But since I don't know those reinventions well, I can't say if this is an accurate portrait.

For example, someone recently told me that in Python you can't have conditionals within math expressions. E.g. you can say the equiv of

(if foo (+ x 1) (+ x 2))

but not

(+ x (if foo 1 2))

To me this just seems gratuitously restrictive. But I
suppose it would at least be an accurate, if rather long,
description of Lisp to teach people Python, and then say
e.g. "Ok, now imagine if you could also just put any
expression anywhere." Plus a few other things, of course...
CS290F at UCSB: Scaling Ruby on Rails on Amazon EC2
Go for open source tool, learn them..use them, develop a solid business model and use this as a starter to showcase your skills. If its rock solid, you will get the recognition. Use this fame to seek out "real funds" to kick start your dream projects. Atleast thats what we are upto. Embracing open source and low cost solutions ensure you dont need a businesss credit line
Doesn't look like it, unless they're coming from a home (i.e. not-resolvable-to-hostname) address. Actually, I think all the visits in our logs can be traced back to a cofounder. Which makes sense, as we haven't given out our URL to anyone but yCombinator.

I'd actually be a little disappointed if they had looked at our demo, because it's rather disappointing. We've been doing a bunch of cleanup work so far this Good Friday, and will likely be replacing our mockup layout with an approximation of the real thing over the weekend. So I'd be grateful for a few extra days...
I think there's going to be a lot more of these sites popping up in the near future. Someone's got to take down that monster.
Check your hosts and referers for domains that look like yCombinator. You are using a traffic-analysis tool like Webalizer or AWStats, right?

(Even if you aren't, you can still get them by grepping the access log. It's just harder to compile statistics.)
sheeessshhh its rather bad to check on this one. We have done our best and given links to demo, we need to have patience to wait till the results are out. When u give u r exams you wait for results, not break into prof's room and check on the stack and see if he has corrected u r papers :D...this is real bad habit ;-)
Not applicable for young web startups. Banks like lending to people and businesses with assets and revenues not ideas. Plus, if you take on debt you it makes it harder to cut and run if your idea doesn't pan out the way you planned.
I've been reading the "E-Myth," which also describes three roles of the founder: Technician, Manager, and Entrepreneur. (These roughly corresond to the roles you outline). The first part of this book is an excellent analysis of why many startup companies fail. The rest of the book's advice gets worse, and by the end it is a naked advertisement for the author's seminars and consulting services.

Get it from the library.
While it may have been better to wait another few days, the application process is nearly over. I'm trying to determine how much an online demo actually matters in the process.

In the case of Zenter, things they'd previously built helped them get accepted. They didn't actually have an online demo of what they were proposing.
That looks interesting, but be sure to check out Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers." http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/fog0000000249.html

I'm skeptical of a ruleset that includes "Some things can't be made simple." I say that not because it isn't true, but if you find yourself devoting a whole rule to a caveat then there is probably a better way to explain the first 8 rules.
Thanks very much for your response. I don't think it's odd because this article (even with it's length) would probably benefit people coming from entirely different environments. They might know something about programming but need some help grasping the fundamental differences between writing programs in say C# vs. Lisp or Python.

Oddly enough, after reading his article and letting is sink in a little bit more, I was able to understand your writing better. That's no fault of yours, I just think it's a little bit of a shortcut to getting over that initial confusion.

Thanks.
Interested in a startup hub in San Francisco area?
"For example, someone recently told me that in Python you can't have conditionals within math expressions."

You can, but until Python 2.5 you needed to use a somewhat opaque idiom:

x + (foo and 1 or 2)

This works because the short-circuiting boolean operators return their second operand. So if foo is true, it'll evaluate 1, find that it's true, and return 1. If foo is false, it short-circuits over the 1, evaluates the 2, finds that that is a true value, and so returns 2. It's not intuitive at all, but most serious Pythonistas are familiar with it.

I agree that this is gratuitously restrictive, and evidently the Python developers did too. As of Python 2.5, you can do this:

x + (1 if foo else 2)

It's a shame that it took so long for them to add it, though.
Inspired by The New Scene in NYC for Entrepreneurs ( http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9585 )

I live in SF, so this will be in the SF area, but I may look as far south as Menlo Park if space is good or high demand for further south.

I will try to throw a website together in a week or so, but in the meantime, please post here or shoot me an email at jklemail at gmail . com if you're interested in helping me out or in joining.

I'm trying to work on a project too, so I will need all the help I can get. Right now I am browsing for office spaces in the SF area and Peninsula area in craigslist to see the price ranges and what's available. But it's really just surveying now since it's impossible to decide on it without more feedback and definite interest. But what I'm shooting for is cheap location with good parking and hopefully some windows to sun light. I am estimating 200 sq ft per member (100-150 for actual cube space, depending on single person or group, and extra spaces for walkways, lunch area, bathroom, etc). So I guess once there's more feedback, you guys can help me out in hunting down good locations in either craigslist or other sources. Base on my fuzzy math of 200 sq ft/cube, we should be aiming for ~$1/sq ft (hopefully less, depending on location, etc.) in order get it down to the ~$250/member/month mark. Of course, that's just fuzzy math, I'm sure we'll have to adjust that once we know the actual # of signups and what they want.
Here's my filtered link to craigslist:
SF:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/off/sfc?maxAsk=6000&minSqft=2000
peninsula: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/off/pen?maxAsk=6000&minSqft=2000

Financial and time wise, I'm looking for someone who have extra money or time or both to partner with me so I don't have to take all the burden. Without 1 or more financial partners, I won't be able to do anything before getting some kind of deposits/initial rentals from early signups.

ps. can you guys up vote this "news" if you are at least interested so I can get a feel of interest level and also it will be ranked higher so more people can see and know about it?

thanks,
john
Maybe, but the encryption is entirely in the hands of the client application that dropbox provides (I suppose it is not open source), so it is still a matter of faith.
that seems considerably less random ;-)
Well online demo may be just a rain-check to show that you know the technology you are using, you know what you are doing and in short to show you are on right track. Sometimes describing how you would go about doing stuff will also go a long way too
Might as well fund your start-up with scratch off lotto tickets while you're at it.
Whats your NEXT invention?