skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That doesn't mean that the risk shouldn't be minimized.
Somebody here was organizing such a place.
In terms of seeding for my site, if let's say 100 people added just one resource and just one sticky for that resource, then I think the site would look much better.

This is something that can be done in less than 15 minutes.
For many it's a willingness to move beyond their comfort zone. Once they know the stress/workload/etc. levels will have them on their tippy-toes and no higher, they may be ready.
Wow, you did not comprehend a single word I wrote. Therefore this conversation is over.
manufacturing laborers unionized because they were in great demand? so shouldn't the tech bubble workers have unionized as well since they, too, were in such great demand? union qua union, ithink, serves a purpose -- ie ensure the well being of its members. and it was unions that provided workers with leverage to negotiate higher salaries and more benefits - not because they wer in such great demand. if workers already had leverage because they were scarce, i don't see why this would lead them to forming unions. and contrary to what PG implies, i think there were some extraordinary, heroic union organizers.
a) Look around some more. An article about CSS hacks might not be a "startup article", but it may definitely be of interest to startup founders. This is decidedly different from an article about, say, Spider-man 3's box office success.

b) Excuse me? Nothing is off topic on Reddit.
Why not? I don't think Paul was asking for a mathematical breakdown of who has contributed to your idea so far. (You: 60%, Her: 28%, Neighbor: 10%, Former Roomate: 1%, inspirational Paul Graham article, 0.5%, etc.)

You could have said that she's a founder as well. I think that could have even increased your chances of being accepted. And if you say she contributed enough for it to count, and you know that both of you would quit your jobs to work on the idea if you received a lot of funding, how does that not make her a founder? You as a family would also keep more of a company as two founders than as one, if you had to give stock to your first or second employees who join later on (I could be wrong.)
I've just quit and it's a liberating, and very scary, feeling. It's also great in that it totally focuses you.
Here's something of that nature I came across some time ago: http://forumshock.com. No clue if something like that is even effective.

Many times, it's hard to show the value of your site without a populous user base. It'd be wise to look for a very specific, good use case that will help spread your service -- or you might get lucky with something like YouTube's "One Lazy Sunday" of your own.
Sure, labor prices always vary with supply and demand. I'm not contradicting that, or merely restating it. What I'm saying is that the hot companies of the early 20th century happened to be a type that needed lots of people. Those before and after didn't, earlier ones because they just weren't as big, and later ones because they tended to hire programmers by the tens, not factory workers by the hundreds.

So labor unions were a historical anomaly, because they happened at a time when, uniquely in history, single organizations needed to hire large numbers of people and didn't need to be too careful about how much they paid them.
I was a Tektonic customer for about a year but I started to have significant problems with them, both technical and billing issues. Email me for the gory details. It was about 2 years ago, so they might have gotten their act together since then.
The nontrepreneur ("...using the rather unfair example of Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz.")
ÂYou could go to Mattel.com, download Barbie, scan your MomÂs head, slap the head on Barbie and print it out,Â

And this would be good how? Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode where George's fiance had a doll that looked like his mum.
Heading to San Fran for three days, tips on events/people/things that I should check out while I'm there?
I'm heading west to scout out the land of milk-and-VC money for a few days. I'll be swinging by Stanford and Berkeley for an afternoon. Anyone else know good startup-oriented events to check out between May 9th and 11th?
There are many services for this. Forums such as digital point or software auction sites like rentacoder work well. Even paying outright for your users is very common. Numerous large social sites with money have used affiliate systems such as commission junction, usually offering from .75$ to 2$ per user. Finally, youtube, myspace, every big social site has done contests that award people who refer the most new users.

I find the ways of getting users without paying for them directly to be more interesting though.
Wow...what a timely question. I just let my manager know today that I'd be leaving in a few weeks.

For me it was a combination of finances and introspection.

As far as finances go, I worked long enough to save a bit of money to work full-time, at least through the summer and a little beyond. That should give us enough initial runway.

The introspection part is obviously more personal. I'm young and naive enough to go out on a limb right now and do this. I've had almost a year of work experience, enough to know that I don't like working for someone else, and enough to get a taste for what works/doesn't in "real" company.

Of course it feels risky, but after a little soul-searching, you get to a point where you feel more at ease.

But I totally agree with Readmore:

"it's a liberating, and very scary, feeling. It's also great in that it totally focuses you."

But then again, how scary can it be? We're lucky to be entrepreneurs in America. We have a lot of blessings and opportunities people in other countries don't have. We aren't going to be shot, tortured, or starved by doing our startups (as much as we can joke about how painful it will be :-). We're not going to DIE. So let's enjoy the ride :-)
Technological Way of Living
Interview with Josh Harris, CEO, Operator11 | socalTECH.com
Top 15 Web 2.0 Startups in Europe?
This is a great move for myspace. They finally figured out how to charge their users real money for those picture filled profiles -- all while being able to act like nice guys who give away everything for free. I predict that they will actually make a nice return on this investment.

More interestingly though, myspace has now put captchas in place for editing myspace profiles and similar actions that photobucket and many web2 sites have been using extensively. For example, photobucket could automatically put pictures in any section of your profile just by supplying photobucket with your myspace username and password.

Is myspace trying to crush future competition? Yes, yes they are.
b) I can read, I swear! (I totally missed the thing about blatantly off topic. Dunno what I was thinking.)
She's a full-time mom, and I don't want her to quit that job. Yes, it could have increased our chances of being accepted, but we thought it was important to be perfectly honest in terms of commitment level. I wanted to involve YC only if we and they were a match. They may not know how to help us anyway.
It's the final result that counts the most. If he wasn't pulling his weight I'm pretty sure the others would have kicked up a stink and given him the boot.

I actually talked with Steve about this exact topic a few months ago. The point he made was, in general, if you give a partner all the equity up front, kicking him out later doesn't make sense. Even if he's extremely unproductive, your only choice is to try to work things out.

Otherwise, he's just walking away with a huge chunk of the company.
Needs readline support! Really.
"""Early 2000. Our first official offsite. Every single person in our 20-person-ish crew went to this place, which had no cellphone or pager reception. The site went down and was dead for an hour."""

Hah
That is an interesting argument.

Now what public policies would you advocate for based on your previous thesis ?
When was the last time you visited Reddit?
Disregard - hit the wrong button ;-)
Spat between Valleywag & Michael Arrington
dude. This is exactly the problem. When someone thinks differently, they become quickly part of the other group. This is 2007. Every single one of us is supposed to be an activist on his own. As long as you are not taking away from others it is fine. Make your point, Defend your point. If 5 people in room always agree, then clearly that room is clearly not filled with intelligent people.
Dude. relax.
It has nearly been a week for me. I used to visit multiple times a day, but I prefer the strong focus of news.yc. Just wondering if anyone else has found news.yc as addictive.
I don't see the connection you're trying to draw in your last sentence. If 5 (edit: X) people in a room always agree, it says nothing about their intelligence.
I gave my notice this past friday. Best day of my life. My co-founder left his job in December.
Yes it does. The compensation to the worker for the risk may cost more than reducing the risk. Therefore the risk will be minimized if possible to save cash.
...roughly 30 seconds ago.

But yeah, I'm finding myself spending less time on Reddit and more on news.YC. Also spending less time on both and more time programming, which I guess is an encouraging sign.
Yubnub is extra cool if you create a Firefox keyword search for Yubnub. Then you can go: "yb gi commodore 64" in the address bar and have it carry out the Yubnub command
I quit my job last week, just make sure you have enough savings to fund your startup and survive (rent, food, etc...) for the next 6 months.
Solid +1. I think of this the same way.
An alternative News.YC feed with a link to the comments thread in the body of the posts
I got tired of waiting for News.YC to implement the comments links in a format usable by my newsreader. (Yes, I know they're in there, but I don't know of any reader that actually uses the comment tags.) So I made this one. When you hit it, it downloads the feed from News.YC and reformats it into an Atom feed (I like Atom; there's only one standard, not 9 like there are for RSS (see http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/02/04/incompatible-rss )). The feed is cached for the next five minutes in order to be nice to pg's servers.

Total code: approximately ten lines of Python, thanks to some excellent libraries like http://www.feedparser.org/

pg, if you have any technical adjustments you'd like me to make, like adjusting the time between hits to your rss feed, let me know.
Its been a month for me. I still have their feed, but I am just not interested in it anymore
Brad Fitzpatrick's Updated LiveJournal Scaling Presentation at LinuxFest NW 2007
It is addictive; the best articles are posted and voted up here --- less time on the blogsphere ---- more time programming :)
Thats a good idea. I would suggest to use something like Wordpress or Drupal, which is more suited for a service like this. What would you call it?
Markus Frind Drops His $60k/yr Comscore Account for Compete.com's Free Statistics
So, you can find out how your site ranks among people who install Compete.com's toolbar? How does this differ from Alexa?
I wish biotech investors were realizing that life science startups have gotten exponentially cheaper as well. The local incubator thinks our company is worthless because we don't have any patents.
Photobucket was a steal vs. Google/YouTube
---In a year or so this deal is likely to look as brilliant for NewsCorp (which owns MySpace) as the MySpace acquisition was. Some would argue that they play dirty poker, but shutting Photobucket down at a crucial point in the acquisition negotiations was a brilliant move, and may have shaved hundreds of millions of dollars off of the purchase price.

Ouch.
PAUL GRAHAM FOR PRESIDENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PAUL GRAHAM FOR PRESIDENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

PAUL GRAHAM FOR PRESIDENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well Russ. The point is not the number.It's like saying your startup has only 2% chances of succeeding. It is just to say something the majority. In my case what I am saying is that not every one has the same opinion. And that is exactly what makes the Internet powerful. If we all wanted the same opinion we would read USA Today, but no we come here and find people who think completely differently from others. But the best thing is that within that group, they still think differently from one person to the other.
Again, if they are 5 people in a room and they always have the same ideas and principles, They are never going to learn from each other.
At what point do you quit your startup to find a day job?
Or in early June so those of us in the summer batch can come.
I've never visited reddit except when linked to it from other sites.
(Ignore; I incorrectly stated this was a dupe.)
Photobucket Was A Steal vs. Google/YouTube
'... The point he made was, in general, if you give a partner all the equity up front, kicking him out later doesn't make sense. Even if he's extremely unproductive, your only choice is to try to work things out. ...'

The "Ki" scenario. Remember in Startup.com (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup.com) where a founder put an estimated 4 months + 20K then didn't quit his job. After negotiation he walked with 200K+ USD but this time paid for by his co-founders. There must be a better way.

Maybe increasing to total equity as progress is made, because you can bet with a group of four there is always going to be a chance of one founder for some reason or another bailing. But the way it's panned all, are paid. Maybe not as much as they theoretically could have. But money in hand (and a job), now is worthy objective.
DemoGirl takes over the online demo market
Can Internet Controlled Robots (like this one) be the basis for an Exciting Sport?
SoundSlides shows big boys photo + audio
Well I never claim to be good at programming, or much of anything. In fact I've found that trying to improve your skills while thinking of yourself as only marginally capable is great inspiration to keep trying harder, even when you've surpassed the best. Is this not a defining characteristic of some of the most talented?

He can claim not to be a programmer or entrepreneur and that's just fine - But his actions speak louder than words.

By the way, webpy is great. It will be the foundation of many web products. Who gives a damn if everyone's going to ignore the value that it brought to reddit.
I'm moving down there in June, and I'll be living with/in contact with some cool kids. I think we'd all be interested in NYC meetups.
'... Paul wanted to give Aaron Swartz, another YC founder, a birthday gift in November. More than anything else, Aaron wanted co-founder so Paul suggested the 'merger'. Merger is probably a bit hyperbolic for what actually happened, Aaron basically moved in with us and we made him a co-founder. ...'

They didn't push hard enough. This would have been the chance to negotiate ~ "What were some of the most flexible decisions you made?", http://tinyurl.com/39yobc
Firefox 3's Cairo to compete directly with Flash and Silverlight
Reversed question.
Whups. That's what I get for scanning for keywords.
It must have seemed like a reasonable decision at the time; nobody had been nearly as badly burned by Aaron at that point as they have been since. If this reputed eccentric whiz kid hacker who wrote your web framework wants to join your startup, it doesn't occur to you that he might not produce and that therefore you should mess with the equity terms. I'd say that you shouldn't blame the people who made that reasonable of a decision for what happened since.
7 months, went downhill after the posts deviated from tech.
What is this, the false modesty one-upmanship Olympics?
Context: Aaron called himself a founder of reddit, and then there was a brawl about it on the Reddit thread about his PR fiasco of an interview. Personally, I think no one would have objected to him calling himself a founder if it had been evident that he had done actual work in proportion to the volume and pomposity with which he talks.
"How does this differ from Alexa?"

It's done much better. Alexa was bought by Amazon so innovation stopped. Compete.com is still improving at startup-speeds and becoming a pretty kickass tool.
I was a Redditict since the earliest days until recently. I've gone from checking it ~20 times a day to once or twice a day. It's been totally overrun and is almost completely useless to me now. The programming subreddit is still somewhat interesting, but not especially great.

It is very good to know that PG will try and keep this site focused on startups. That's what I always enjoyed on Reddit in the early days. But Reddit never really had any official focus. I think that's probably a big part of why it has been overrun with links to anything shiny.
i saw enough of a need for my idea to quit outright and just go for it (although i have some cash saved up and can live off a low burn rate). i think that if you have the right idea and are truly passionate about it, you just know that you will be able to make it work. i did my first company by bootstrapping/moonlighting, and thought i was passionate about it, but really in retrospect it was a stupid hedge (i didn't quit my day job, for example) and my reluctance to go for it should have just been a signal that i didn't really believe in the idea as much as i thought.

as far as the new idea, i intended to leave outright back in january but instead reached an agreement with my employer to go part time for a few months (to finished a project/accrue some more stock) while i built a prototype for my idea. (in retrospect, another unnecessary hedge, but live and learn.)

not being full time on my new idea quickly became very frustrating as i felt my attention was fractured, but i still got a lot done, and it was a decent compromise that allowed me to get a team and a prototype together and sanity check the idea with smart people/entrepreneurs/investors and secure seed funding.

that said, i would be a lot further along if i had been full time over the past 3-4 months, so if i could do it again i would have quit earlier.

in any case, my last day is this friday, and i had given notice before my yc interview (even though funding hadn't yet been secured.) it's helpful to have a cushion (6 months to a year) to tide you over until you'll have something (prototype, team, ideally even something more like a beta launch) that is attractive to angels or VCs. and add some elbow room because it'll probably take you 2-3x as long as you think! the cushion helps to save you from needing to have to scrap around for consulting gigs and dilute your focus, but isn't strictly necessary.

but if you're good, your worst case scenario is just getting another job or taking another swing, so it's not as risky as it might seem. and hedging your bets/moonlighting/halfassing things (they're all the same thing :)) is more of a risk than just going for it unless you have some strange idea where getting to market quickly isn't absolutely critical.

drew (http://getdropbox.com )
Let's try a test:

- Who here is creating or has created a web page for their startup? Did it use some CSS?

- Who here has dealt with unions for their startup?

PG's article is not even practical in its treatment of unions, something that is a highly political topic. I guess politics is where I would really start to draw a line... some economics is ok, but PG isn't an economist, and this article, right or wrong, has little relevance for most of us here.

I'm not judging the article itself, but I hope in the future that that sort of discussion can be left to reddit. I sympathise with the point that "it's a tight community", but these things usually start to head downhill. I like to talk politics and economics myself, and would certainly enjoy doing so more here than on reddit, but if we all started posting articles about those sorts of things, I could see it becoming a bit too prevalent...
I am reading it through an rss reader, and the cross posts are really annoying :(.
The issue is EFI. The new Intel-based Macs do not use BIOS.
short answer: part time sucks. long answer: part time sucks. i did a variant of this (school for part of it, work for another) for 3 years with my first company, and it was frustrating because you miss opportunity after opportunity because you move so slowly, and everything just turns out mediocre.

so if you have to do your startup with a 40-50hr/wk job, do it as briefly as possible until you can prove to yourself the worth of the idea and then make the jump. and this may sound strange, but get yourself in decent physical shape so that you have more stamina and aren't exhausted after a normal 8-9 hour work day. in my case i had way more energy/focus if i was running/lifting regularly (and frittered around/needed more downtime if i wasn't.)

i'm going full time on my idea at the end of this week and have a lot more momentum because 1) other people will be working on it with me and 2) i will be able to focus 100% and do things like pull all nighters when necessary and basically not have any other constraints in the way of getting things done.
the max levchin interview is fantastic, and probably among the top entrepreneurship-related things i've seen/read in a long time. i haven't seen the others, but seriously, go watch or read max's interview (he co-founded paypal and slide); there are a variety of gems about vetting startup ideas, working hard, catching "waves"/emerging markets, understanding business issues as an engineer, and lots of other things the news.yc should appreciate.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/002.html
FYI: no one calls it "san fran". What the city is called is evidently of some concern, and the object of trends and whims:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/10/14/DD67721.DTL&type=travelbayarea

Too much navel gazing for me, I'd rather live someplace that just has a name and that's that.
YC.News 'Mark as Read' Firefox Extension
Aaron Swartz's Unfiltered Review of Wired's Work Environment
as soon as you're fully vested at your other startup
Stop Twittering and Go Solve a Problem
When your wife finds a job that pays pretty well:-)

It is such a liberating feeling! I am realizing that independance is my biggest motivator. Getting rich would be great, but I'd settle for a good living where I'm in charge of my own destiny. I could care less about telling other people what to do... actually I don't really like that, I like working with people that basically know what needs to be done.
It is so difficult to get the right users to pay for your services when the most people using the Internet believe in getting things for free.

The problems of most startups (and VCs who back them) is their lack of discipline to map out a tangible goal and direction.

How can people develop a product when they do not know the market?
Developing a product that is looking for a marketplace is a challenging way to generate revenue.
For Reddit to save itself, it needs to put a major effort into the 'recommended page'. Iff the recommended page delivered a tailored experience to each user, then it would not matter (nearly so much) how many 'Digg refugees' arrived on the site. If your interest is programming, your recommended page would show you a programming site with articles that interested you.

The social media site that gets this right will solve the issue of the constant migration of thought leaders - slashdot - Digg - Reddit - ?Y Combinator? -?? If the recommended page really worked, it would become the user's default page, and thought leaders wouldn't have noticed a change in demographic.

Someone will turn these nomads into sticky participants, and then they've constructed a durable competitive advantage.

(edit typo)
Andrew Chen: How to fool VCs into thinking you have traction, Part 2
To answer the original question, my last visit was about 10 minutes ago. These days, I find I downmod or hide 90% of my recommended stories.
OK. A "friend" of mine never brags about accomplishments. wtf is the difference?
Andrew Chen: An alternative to freemium? Learning from video games
O'Reilly Radar  State of the Computer Book Market, Q107, part 1 - Overall Market