skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The question is ,are you behind money or are you driven by passion? If you are behind cash, get a job.
Else, go for your startup dream, and stop worrying about MBA.

Now that you asked this question,my suggestion is , get a job, do an MBA.If your life's script has startup chapter in it, you will do it on the way!
Lots of companies in Cambridge, UK, start up from business plan competitions. Sure, the really top entrepreneurs may turn there noses up at such competitions but the rest benefit so much and more people understand the start-up process.
Also the sponsors love it and provide food and wine for the networking events.
Then the Mums and Dads also read about start-ups in the news and people everywhere are more supportive of entrepreneurship
Dedicated to helping people understand equity using graphical tools and a database, from Cambridge, UK
I suspect there's a hidden upside to a startup that require a lot of money...it's going to be more difficult for competitors to get off the ground as well.
Dreamweaver is not successful.

Analyse Dreamweaver's cost/profit ratio. Remember, Dreamweaver is boxed and sold at retail. The advent of AJAX gave Dreamweaver a little more life, since to make an impressive AJAX page requires a ridiculous amount of not very well structured code. Keeping track of not very well structured code is what IDE's are good at, and what Dreamweaver's target audience is bad at. That said, as a percentage of total revenues, Dreamweaver sucks. Check it out for yourself in Adobe's latest quarterly report:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/sec?s=ADBE

Dreamweaver sales were used to bump up the "Developer Solutions" line of the quarterly report. Notice it is a small percentage. This would not be so bad, until you notice that even the line in the quarterly report marked "Other" is bigger!

Here's some free advice, do not invest in a startup that plans to make a straight IDE play.
Use the "submit" link near the top of this page. Leave the url field blank to submit a question for discussion.
I completely agree. Some people don't seem to care about standing up and can talk for hours.

I personally think the best meetings are where I can keep working at my PC while I listen in on the meeting conversation. This way I reach the end of the meeting having kept abreast of other developments and also fixed some bugs at the same time.
Sun's Fortran replacement goes open-source
Programming Language Research Group (Fortress)
Believe it or not, Fortran is still used extensively in scientific research circles.. Although badass Java libraries such as JScience are starting to take over.
Video: Another way to speed up Firefox
Microsoft opens up on Web strategy at Mix07
So much for the 'new and improved' GPL
EarthLink rethinking muni Wi-Fi?
Lifting the lid on government with Google
Using the Web to navigate California freeway collapse
TechCrunch coverage of Yahoo/Right Media acquisition
And you thought all the good domain names were taken?
Go BIG Launches 'Projects' Posting Service
I am new. I'm from Manchester, England, and I write a network simulator in Java. I'm mainly interested in Lisp at the moment, and its potential for children and for embedding into existing applications, such as media players.
More about Xobni financing
Without even reading anything about it, they lost me w/ the "Ayn Rand character in a tie" logo.
the logo rocks. you're a communist. ;)
Nice. I just registed Ycombin8r.com
Blinded by the Apple iPod
WSJ: Tech entrepreneurs looking for seed money have more places to turn these days
Article is titled, "Early Options: Tech Entrepreneurs looking for seed money have more places to turn these days."

Not sure where to find a public copy on the web?
I am also a business folk (Babson College Entrepreneurship program) and using Hackety Hack to try and gain some basic Ruby knowledge. I like it so far.
Nobody is using ourdoings.com because it's written in Scheme. They use it because they're busy with activities that lend themselves to photography (e.g. traveling or raising kids), and they don't have a lot of time to share/organize. Lisp hacking is not a photogenic activity.

If you want to leverage a language for publicity, you need to pick something that hackers in that language would want to do.
I will probably attend and bring a co-founder of mine or two.

Background:
Serial young entrepreneur and blogger based out of Babson College (about to graduate). Also started a venture development firm for young entrepreneurs to launch ventures cheaper and faster (Invenio Group), we are about four years old at this point and continue to grow and thrive.

Excited to attend!
I'll be there too. I've done some good hacking in that coffee house. They don't have free WiFi though :(
I just read the article (I get the WSJ in the office). Nice mention, congrats!
Killed due to sockpuppet upvotes. Do that again and we will ban the site.
Also uploaded to scribd: http://tinyurl.com/26tdz8
Intriguing comment by pg about New England investors lacking confidence. Anyone venture a guess to why, and how this will change (or not) in the next 18 months?

Culture is obviously important. If NE is conservative, there are other proclaimed tech "hotspots" that are ultra conservative when it comes to web business.
Web 2.0 Shows Signs Of Becoming Bubble 2.0
great article - nice to see the "launch on the cheap, fail on the cheap, small investment" model is garnering so much press. Charels River and Y Com sure have reaped the rewards of taking a lead role in this new model.
Acquisition Exit: it's not just Google & Yahoo
I think this is good thing to do for the community. Is this open source? can we contribute to the lessons?
Google and Yahoo are most startups' exit strategies, according to conventional wisdom. And now we've seen a few articles about how Google and Yahoo really aren't acquiring very many companies.

But Google and Yahoo are hardly the only companies that buy companies.

How about Amazon? Amazon buys companies, and is probably going to buy a lot more. Ebay. News Corp (Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace and wants to buy more). VeriSign. Cisco (it acquires small companies all the time!).

And it's not just the big boys. You don't necessarily need a serial acquirer -- for instant, stock site TheStreet bought out startup StockPickr. Private-but-successful startup Six Apart (Type Pad, Moveable Type, for those of you who've been asleep) bought out LiveJournal.

This post isn't just a retort to the "better find another exit strategy" meme.

What other companies do acquisitions? I suspect I've barely scratched the surface here.
In my experience with Seaside (which uses roughly the same technique), extremely well. There's a demo site at http://scriptaculous.seasidehosting.st/, fwiw.
What particular problems are caused by the user being kept on one server?
Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley During the Boom and Bust (interesting conclusions, see comments)
GigaOM: Why Hollywood suddenly loves tech?
I hear its COBOL replacement went open-source a while ago.
This study had some interesting findings. For those of you who don't want to read the whole thing:

- "Denver had the highest entrepreneurship rate at 0.45 percent. The comparison across MSAs reveals that Silicon Valley did not have one of the highest rates of entrepreneurship during the late 1990s."

- "The rest of California and several large MSAs had higher rates of entrepreneurship than Silicon Valley during the late 1990s."

- "During the post boom period, entrepreneurship rates were higher in all but one year [as compared to the boom period]." The paper hypothesizes that the boom "suppressed" entrepreneurship in the Valley during the 90s.

- "Entrepreneurship rates in Silicon Valley increased from 0.31 percent in the period of strong economic growth in the late 1990s to 0.35 percent in the post-boom period of the early to mid 2000s."
YouTube Launches Active Share
These deals do happen all the time, but you don't hear about most of them because they're not in the sexy (resisting urge to say bottom joke) Web 2.0/social networking space.

Instead, they tend to happen in more boring (but profitable) areas like accounting or security software.

This site (a boutique broker specializing in software acquisitions) has a list of recent M&A deals along those lines: http://corumgroup.com/CorumTransactions.asp
I remember a few years ago Paul was proclaiming that as the cost of starting a company keeps going down, VCs will become extinct. It is interesting to see how the perspective is changing. Now Paul says you need investors to gain advantage over competition even though, oftentimes, a startup needs very little to make a product that people want.
Who pays $2,000 just to have a chance to pitch angel investors? That's insane.
SplashCast Expands Media Player
I've been doing programming in science for 3 years now, and Fortran is a huge, huge problem. Fortran is too much like C, and think about how good C is for writing differential equations. There are tons of potential bugs in the programs I see, and very few opportunities to check for correctness. Development time takes an order of magnitude longer than it should. I've argued with physicists many times over this, and the issues they bring up are always:

- Alternatives are too slow

- I have a huge code base that I don't want to port over.

- I don't need (eg.) closures. If I ever designed a program that needed them, I wouldn't choose Fortran, but that has never happened

- (most popular) Programming is just a tool. I'm interested in the physic, not programming, and Fortran is Good Enough

I don't know if Fortress will succeed. I hope it does, but unless they can show that Fortress programs are both shorter and faster, I don't think it will happen. Mathematica, Matlab and IDL already have too much of a lock on the market for 'inefficient' computing.

My money is on a Mathematica clone eventually becoming faster than Fortran. It should happen.
The recent trend seems to be that SFP kids live and work in Cambridge for the summer, then move out to the valley right after the program's done.

If Cambridge/Boston investors aren't helping folks take their ideas to the next level, why do the program on the east coast at all? Mountain View's got nice weather year-round.
Will be there. There is also the weekly OpenCoffee in Cambridge that does have free WiFi and a mix of VCs and entrepreneurs. ( http://boston.going.com/event-122245 )
That's exactly what I thought, too.

If Graham really feels that way about the East Coast investors (and especially if he says so publically), he might as well make California the permanent YC home.
For those of you who don't want to read the whole thing

Yes, thank you.
From the web site's perspective, karma is a mechanism for internal calculations, and is in no way a measurement of your intellect or morality (?) or whatever else. And karma can't be turned into money for you, so why bother at all? :)

That's why a possibility of being downvoted never stopped me from commenting, be it reddit, slashdot, or YCnews.

One lesson that I learned from reddit in particular, is that if you are interested in the topic, you should read all comments, all the way down the page, because there might be something there, in the negative karma area.
I've had poor luck with elance. The quality just hasn't been very high.
... and besides, I believe the karma system can be greatly improved by taking into account sub-comments.
From the FAQ: http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/Fortress/faq.html

"As a result, we are able to support features in Fortress such as transactions, specification of locality, and implicit parallel computation, as integral features built into the core of the language."

"Moreover, Fortress has been designed with the intent that it be a ``growable'' language, gracefully supporting the addition of future language features. In fact, much of the Fortress language itself (even the definition of arrays and other basic types) is encoded in libraries atop a relatively small core language."

I haven't looked at the details of Fortress yet, but I don't read 'Java' in the above quotes.
the jetpacked guy invited me to do a guest post on his blog - why not share some news.YC goodness with his readership? =)
Yep, this is true.

If I recall correctly, their access rates are very low. Most of us should be able to get through the night spending less than $10 ($4 for a drink, $6 for internet).
I've noticed this, too.

Wufoo are famously good, and Kevin does all of that work. SocialMoth/Overhear.us have awesome design and Evan does everything. iminlikewithyou.com is tasty (if a bit overly pretty), and I believe they do it in-house, as well. Reddit is great and clean, and Alexis and Steve designed it.

Everyone is swayed by a nice clean design, even technically savvy folks like YC (they also know that a good design can make a good product great, and with bad design the best product will probably fail--MySpace being an obvious and baffling exception to that rule).
That might mean that PG (and the other YC folks) would have to move as well. AFAICT, YC wants to be close to the founders for physical meetings. It might not be easy for YC folks to move (they have their lives, etc.).

Also, Boston is a niche: it is home to some bright tech people. YC is close to them, while the valley is away, so YC is the obvious choice for Boston students. That gives YC a competitive advantage at least in the area and makes it distinct. Moving to the valley would make YC more generic and less of a brand.
Do It Now (annoying ads; good content)
The Art of Execution
Apple's Biggest Flop: The Lisa
TargetSpot Targeting Online Radio Ads
Web 2.0 Lolcat
Certainly puts things in perspective.
Got Roomfuls of Stuff? Now Sites Will Help Keep Track of It
The Long Hallway: on building virtual companies
I dont understand what the dead link means ?

I could still click on it and go to the site...
Had a similar experience with elance. So how did you end up doing it? In house?
The guy confuses the idea of an outlying data point, which is meaningless, with one at the far end of the curve, which is simply hard to replicate.

The iPod, like Michael Jordan, is the latter: a point worth aiming for, even if few make it all the way there.
You have showdead set to yes. By default it's set to no, and then the link is invisible.
Ok I got it now.
Very cool....I've got an Apple Lisa-1 sitting next to my..First TRS-80 Model III, Commodore PET 2001 (8K RAM), Atari 800, Apple II+, KIM-1...I keep one Lisa at work to show the newbie programmers at work what we have today existed back in 1982. The Lisa was away head of it's time (yet a huge financial failure for Apple)
- 32 bit 68000 processor (5Mhz)
- 1MB RAM (Very expensive for 1982)
- Virtual Memory and Multitasking OS
- Integrated Applications (btw it also has cut & paste)
- Screen Saver (Dimmer really)
- Intelligent Power-switch (Puts all your docs away before shutting itself off)
- Twin read heads on the 5.25 Floppy for redundancy and speed (but non-standard)
- Diagnostics in ROM
- GUI Based Operating System (Mac's QuickDraw based on Lisa)
- LisaNet networking built-in

Larry Tesler et al, you did an awesome job!
PG: you are really vigilant, honestly I have never seen more vigilance on an internet service.

Is it just you, or are there other people as well policing news.ycombinator ?

Keep up the good work
eBay Launches ToGo Widgets For Any Listing
O'Reilly Radar:  We'd Love To Hear Your S3 Stories...And Numbers
Google Seeks Clearer Path to State Data - New York Times
Great essay. How about turning it into a "rich illustration" so everyone can see it and talk about it? Look at my site to see what Dill can achieve http://www.equityfingerprint.com/. Anyone like the idea?
"Don't limit yourself to good ideas..."

Bravo, Paul, I almost choked on some water.
Reuters Advances Development of Search Capability With The Acquisition of Clearforest (Apr. 30, 2007)
Oh yes it can! It is called the Investor Agreement. A 10% shareholder or less can control the company if the terms are in the agreement. Most agreements are not publicly available so it is difficult to know what is going on when you compare deals. Have you ever made an angel investment and then regreted that you did not have more control? VCs have. It is like who wins in the end, it all depends on the x of the VC investment. It is not what it says on the can, it is what's inside that matters.
Incentives Matter: Why Comments on Digg Are So Bad (Really Thought Provoking)
Masters of The Blogosphere: The 25 Most Influential Blogs
The 25 most influential blogs ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, RSS Subscribers, Alexa Ranking and Compete and Quantcast traffic data. Finally, a ranking that uses multiple data streams to determine whose king of the hill in the blogosphere.
"if I were launching a new website, here's what I'd do. Instead of hiding the Feedback link in the upper right hand corner, I'd place a form right on the main page. A big form. And I'd bend over backwards to get people to use it."

What are the two lines of code to produce this?
I actually like Ayn Rand a lot. But her heroes and people who start startups typically don't wear ties or pump their fists like Jimmy Connors. These guys clearly don't know their audience.
Maximize Your Self Concept for Business Success
Even more interesting is that he reiterates the advantage of having investors in this essay, which also acknowledges the huge time-cost of funding. This implies that the benefits are worth this high cost. One could disappoint customers or fall behind competitors while engaged full-time in funding.
You just inspired me to register a universal domain: not.tv ;-)

Edit: Ok, universal for everything but TV - but TV is dead, so it's kind of universal.
News.YC site advice - What do you think about the new Klipboardz look?
Bloomberg.com: Supreme Court Clears Way for More Patent Challenges
I'd like to know too. You could do something like the following, but that would mean an ugly email message and ugly thank-you page.

[(define-input feedback)
(mail '("foo@bar") feedback)]Thank you for your input.
That might mean that PG (and the other YC folks) would have to move as well. AFAICT, YC wants to be close to the founders for physical meetings. It might not be easy for YC folks to move (they have their lives, etc.).

Willingness to move to the YC location is a precondition of being accepted into YC. I have to move from Mountain View CA to Cambridge MA for SFP... even though WFPs are held here, where I already live. But I'm not complaining at all; living in Boston for a while sounds great.
"This is actually why I left reddit. As the site grew, I became increasingly frustrated that anything I said contrary to popular opinion was mercilessly downvoted & derided, regardless of the actual quality of the comment."

I hadn't noticed this. In fact, I noticed the opposite -- that well-articulated comments taking controversial views still got upvoted. It was just a stricter quality filter. And anyway, it's easy to take advantage of reddit's predilections. A while ago, I read a great George Will column, and thought it deserved to be reddited. My headline was something like "Notorious Neocon George Will actually believes that..."

I left because it was getting boring and homogeneous.
Does mashable.com hate their readers or something? Why don't you just put all your content below the fold?
Google's a big company with lots of brilliant people. It's hard to imagine any feature or technology they couldn't easily implement. For the rest of us, hopefully those smart people turn into (or remain) researchers don't start churning out products. Of course, that doesn't seem likely.

It does seem like applying technology to social networking is becoming a commodity. Not that there's not more to be done, but there are an aweful lot of me toos and simultaneously similar endeavors. Darwin would be happy.

I think the key to creating value it to look where other's aren't. Once enough smart people and companies are working on a problem, the value you can create by following everyone else is much more deminished. If all the great athletes were trying to become home run hitters, an up and coming athlete would have much better odds looking towards a slightly less popular sport in which to excel.

I think there are too many people trying to hit home runs at social networking. If you have a great (novel) idea, start swinging, if not, look for a different domain to create value, I think your odds will be better.

I think you are right that 3D interfaces are coming up next, but I'm not sure your approach is correct. As others have mentioned here, 3D in a browswer is probably not the way to go. The Croquet Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project) look like they are on to something... and it's free and open source (I wonder how that will effect all those "about to launch" companies you mention). To have satisfactory 3D you want a local engine that works directly with the hardware (or such functionality integrated directly into the browser). But you seem to be disappointed in these options.

With regards to the low barrier to entry concern. Yeah, I see the same thing which is what has stopped me working on a few of my ideas (a couple of times a decision I regret). I think to a large extent this is due to the ever decreasing development times (open source and development efficiency), and more efficient sharing of ideas (blogs/tagging). This seems to be a structural change that will only get worse.

Original thinking definitely creates more value, but I'm not sure it's necessarily creates a higher barrier to entry. While everyone else is running the marathon, take the short cut (look where they aren't). It doesn't matter if you don't have a high barrier as long as you shock everyone with what you produce. It's winning the race that counts (launching a successful company), not trying to run faster than everyone else.
Specific groups can be attracted to a site by a graphical look of a site alone. I think Digg vs. Reddit is exactly about that.

The only thing that I still don't get is excess of politics on Reddit. Maybe it's just those who are interested in politics have one thing in common with most geeks: the lack of artistic taste :)
[Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman] were able to create the illusion of more contributors by submitting articles under different user names

I'm trying to imagine some entrepreneur who opens a new grocery store and asks his family members to go in and out the store all day long pretending they are customers :)
The perception occurred accurately for the creationist, but then the opinions based on that perception had to be woven into a strange hypothesis in an attempt to circumvent the obvious contradiction between the fact (the perceived fossil) and the mental model of creationism in the perceiver's head.

A person has to be pretty far gone when they have automatized evading perceptual evidence to such a degree that they are no longer able to be consciously aware of the contradiction between their beliefs and what they perceive. This kind of evasion can be seen in cults, extreme religious groups, extreme political groups, where extreme = evading perceptual evidence that disproves your held beliefs. Usually group pressure is involved to automatize the evasion.

Perception (and I've been using it in the strictly integrated sensation sense) is our link to reality that enables us to make sure that our mental models don't fall off the deep end. Evade perception at your own peril.
It reminds me of a pyramid scheme.
I'm trying to position the site as a social news site where the submissions are more like actual news articles. They have a picture that draws in attention and then they reposition depending on how popular they are. What do you think?
:) thank you!

Now if someone would actually run the software...!
I tried to look, but the site must be overloaded - nothing displayed.
It seems to be working. Give it another try.
Four Technologies that are about to change the world (and the opportunities they present for startups)
Slashdot | How to Stop Digg-cheating, Forever
oh, haha. now i see that text underneath it. i tend to ignore grayed out text. needs to be stronger in the foreground for usability..