skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hope this kid works quickly. He needs to finish up by 30 because his mind will go blank by then.

This argument is always puppeted by VCs. The younger kids get compelled to compete the adults, and the adults get compelled to show they can compete. The difference is the adults usually have the skills and experience to pull it off. The kid needs all the fuel he can get from naysayers.

It actually plays into both age groups irrational desires. Clever.
Aruba, Starent, Infinera are hot 2007 IPO's of note that were recently in the news. None of them were started by 20-somethings.

I think this site and the referenced bloggers have a software-centric focus. There may well be a significant number of successful 20-somethings in software businesses. But software is a subset of technology and one cannot apply the observations here to technology in general.

Consider this: the global market for communications equipment exceeds 1 trillion dollars -- there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry. Companies such as Qualcomm and Broadcom are other examples where the founders were well-established in their careers, i.e. not 20-something.
To see eye to eye in this community you need to s/startup/webstartup/.
Seems like wesabe, a site that you give access to all your financial information to, should be listed.
Without Amazon, I would never had as much books as I have now. I'm even buying books legally available as PDFs/HTML (including books I've already read). I don't see them disappear anytime soon unless someone comes up with a really good portable device able to compete with paper.

edit: and with websites such as lulu.com I'm sure we'll see even more books printed.
I imagine that hiding the screws is probably great for attracting some segments of customers, but it repels others (namely: me). I don't know if there are many people like me, but one of the reasons why I stopped buying Apple computers and switched to IBM/Lenovo is because the Apple stuff, despite being quite reliable, would inevitably break down at some point, at which point it was nearly impossible to take it apart without first reading and rereading the secret licensed-Mac-technicians-only how-to-take-it-apart manual.

Apple tends to optimize for ease of learning by beginners, not ease of use, let alone tinkering, by experienced users. I don't mean to be patronizing, I'm just observing. In my opinion, truly great user interface design provides a smooth learning curve that's easy to get onto for Aunt Tillie, but also continues to be smooth for J. Random Hacker.

Products with that kind of learning curve are great from an abstract engineering-aesthetic point of view; but assuming that your own sense of aesthetics translates into profit is, of course, wishful thinking. Still, I'm looking forward to a mythic future in which consumer electronics will again be more like the Apple II, and less like what Apple makes today. Examples going in that direction would include the OLPC laptop (http://laptop.org) and the Chumby (http://chumby.com) .
Do u know what is probably the best cartoon startup on the net?
You are mistaken on "immediate". These days everything takes years. I wouldn't expect "forgiveness" either.
But it will be interesting to see if some of the business practices (very low initial budgets, early releases, &c) common in web startups might translate into other fields. At least one YC startup (sproutsys) appears to be doing pretty serious systems software, which is still software, but quite different from being a "web startup".
Your choice #1 must always be javascript. Why lock yourself to Adobe? I can state a very good example.

One of the most widely used components in flash is the webservice component. An app i built in flash depends entirely on this component. But when the latest version of Flash, Flash cs3 came out, there is no webservice component in it! To rewrite my app in Actionscript 3, i must rebuild my app in Flash cs3. Now that this component in not included, its impossible to update my app.[This component is available in Flex, and Adobe can port that component to flash CS3 in no time. They are not doing it for obvious business reason]

Bottomline is,building your business on top of any closed system is a bad idea.

[Side note: Flex is not a big thing as Adobe markets it. Its Flash itself, but built to attract Java developers (developers who come from a background where Flash's timeline concept is unheard of). Flex need to be used ONLY if you cant find a decent actionscript developer. This is because, the only thing Flex does is to provide the developer with a lot of pre cooked UI elements.But by doing so, you will end up using a lot of unwanted code resulting in bloated file size.Do you really want to build a business on top of a very generalized component set? Reducing file size 300k to 10 k is good for you.Hire a decent local actionscript programmer if you have to go with Flash.]
Age - the Ron Paul of yc news.
I feel reminded of those bonus coupons where you have to cut "points" from product packaging. Wasn't it calculated that doing that amounts to working for 7$/hour (joelonsoftware mentioned it: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)?

So it seems to me buying books by the chapter is so complicated that the time saved by just buying the whole book at once is almost worth as much as the savings from only buying parts of it.
Steve McConnell's 'New Classic Mistakes' of Software Development
Exactly. There is a lot of things going on for Facebook. I hope some day it will be revealed, who started this giant PR wave promoting it and who stands behind this hysteria.

I am not commenting on Google vs Facebook nonsense anymore.
But aren't there tons of details in NLP that these founders shouldn't think about? Also, they're getting a Parc researcher as their CTO as part of the deal.
I don't have Java. I also don't have pliers, hammers and I am totally fine with screwdrivers and nails. :-)

I don't use Java because it is too limiting, resulting in inferior/average performance (R&D team's performance, not code's).
I agree with lupin_sansei. The article lacks a credible source to back up their conclusions. In fact, I believe just recently I stumbled upon some numbers that suggest otherwise: because of the Internet people get caught up in the net of social marketing and start buying more books: "OMG!! everybody is reading this, I gotta buy one too" Several books became very popular this way: Freakonomics, Tipping Point, Long Tail.

Seriously, without this largely Internet-based hype about Long Tail I cannot see an article like that (about something obvious) make a book, and a popular one.
Winer is not using the example of Jobs to refute the idea that younger people are good at startups. In fact, he acknowledges that younger people often have the willingness to accept risk and enthusiasm that their older counterparts may not have.

He's trying to refute Wilson's idea that younger people are developing the design patterns of the web while older people are used to reading the newspaper, watching TV and generally out of touch with what's going on with technology. Steve Jobs seems to be a pretty good example of a person whose ideas about technology have improved with age.

In any case, the idea that the average twentysomething is more plugged in than the average fortysomething may be valid, but it should be obvious that the situation changes when you are comparing individuals who are interested in and devoted to technology development.
Debian or Ubuntu for server?
Is Google the Daemon?
Hi guys I'm about to configure a VPS for my web app(for testing and learning purposes plus it's my first time to launch a site in my life much less configure a webserver.) And upon recommendation of my webhost(a2b2) Debian and Ubuntu would be the best choice as I only have a small VPS to begin with. So what do YCers think? which should I choose?
I've been using Ubuntu because of the more frequent releases
I don't understand why this post is getting so many points.

Any computer game can be automated if you can implement an AI that is good enough. Saying that "any game that can be automated deserves to me" seems kind of silly to me.

Calling WoW a glorified Skinner box seems like a similarly useless thing to say. At that level of lexical precision, news.yc is also a "glorified Skinner box," as is driving to work in the morning and going out for dinner at night. I don't really see the point of the analogy.

It's easy to automate "various game activities," but certainly not all game activities and not most of the ones that really matter. It would be more accurate to say that there are some specific activities that can be automated, but the expense of that versus the reliability of a human operator is not worth it. MMOG environments are too volatile, even without considering admins.

Warcraft actually allows a great deal of scripting. Coming from a game like Everquest, the level of automation Blizzard allows is mind-boggling.
Ian Clarke is such an arrogant guy. Back in the day when he was nothing but a developer, he was arrogant as hell, I can only imagine how he is now.

And he's arrogant, and produces nothing but commercial flops. He's a typical close minded geek type, he thinks he knows everything, yet is unable to see the big picture.

Moral of the story: It's not difficult to be polite. There is no excuse for rudeness, but it will come back to bite your ass, even 8 years later!
Yes, to be totally fair I should say "web or software startup" qualifier, but I found it less elegant to type. And really, it seems to be the rare exception among either YC Companies or just discussions on this site. A sign of the times, perhaps, but still a point on the semantics of "startup" around here.

Honestly I found it annoying for a while, until I realized it would be a waste of time to qualify the term startup every time when it's clear what the domain of conversation is.
I don't get the flash decision.
Lots of "wow cool" flashy transitions etc, but who cares about them when you want to write a quick document quickly on the web.
For that matter who cares about whether it will match exactly when you print it?
All I want is a fast, quick, editor that interoperates with other things easily (eg with a javascript/ajax ui, you can resize the font from the browser etc... not so with flash).
From what I can read on their recruitment page (http://sproutsys.com/careers.html), SproutSys seems to plan cool stuff!

Regarding web startups: well, a few of them are quite innovative but most of them are indeed uninteresting copies of copies of copies... It's boring.

So, who is working on something else than web stuff here? Any hardware startups?
Entrepreneurs: Know When Its Time To Give Up
Last.FM Competitor MyStrands Raises $25 Million
I'd recommend a distro designed for server use, like CentOS. You'll find its packages are a little out of date because they are well tested and known to be stable. The default install is hardened and security updates are prompt. Also automatic updates are pre-configured and just need to be enabled.
Can you come up with a product that is complete (100% can serve everybody needs in the universe) but not bloat?

Can you come up with a product that starts faster, install faster, requires less memory requirements, and don't crash as much as MS Words but also provides the same amount of features comparable to MS Words?

When I plug my iPod to my Ubuntu version 6.06, Ubuntu crashed my iPod without any informative feedback. When I dmesg-ed, I saw some hex number and some usbX where X is a number.
No Microsoft-Ubuntu deal in the works, Canonical CEO says
Adaptive Path: Why content management fails
Ooops, I give it up several times a day :)
The paging is annoying. Yeah, it's "cool". But UI experience and techie coolness are sometimes distinct.
Or he can use a different distro...like ArchLinux, Slackware or Gentoo. But if it's between just those two, then I agree with you, go for Ubuntu! :D
The Very Organized Hit Job On LifeLock
"First, cut a hole in the box...."
There are maybe one or two genuinely thought provoking articles on the entire web each week. What does it matter how the rest of them are displayed?
If Dot Com buble companies had been a little more thrifty, we might see a few more of them around today. I think the cheap factor is just a correction for the spending spree during the first bubble.
Initially I used Debian's "testing" release. With PostgreSQL 8.1 now in stable, I recently switched to "stable". I develop on an Ubuntu notebook and have never had any nasty surprises deploying from development to production.
Indeed. Very funny that it's the last sentence. Isn't that kind of important information that belongs at the top of the article?
3 Things a Founder Can't Tell their Team
I've been using Debian stable as a server for the past 8 years. The stability has been top-notch and I actually prefer having a distro that doesn't update very often. The less time I can spend updating a server the more time I can spend delivering value to my customers.
Prometeus - The Media Revolution
Xbox 360: Microsoft's Trojan Horse
I will second CentOS... it's solid.
I've been running Debian on a VPS for about two years and the ease of maintenance and overall sensible default security policies make it a great server OS. I'll always go for an OS where my default system is well-tested, stable, and trivial to maintain. I can then spend some time manually installing the latest versions of the two apps (web server and db) whose latest features I may need.

It seems to me that Ubuntu is pretty much like Debian with a more shorter upgrade cycle. Is that impression accurate? Also, does Ubuntu have any extra overhead that a Debian system might not have?
the fact that this system uses bayes inference means it is doomed for failure. bayes requires large amount of training data. Most users want instant satisfaction. That could only mean failure.
There was a discussion on this earlier.

We are working on a wireless hw/sw/fw startup. Of late I've had at least one Web2.0 person express an interest in working for us. I expect we'll find many others who find the web startup scene boring.
Thrown out of Ebay Live for wearing Google shirt
Go with Debian stable. It's rock-solid.

I've done very poorly with Ubuntu. I've tried installing it twice. The first time, it installed successfully but then when I rebooted it trashed my RAID configuration and dropped into single-user mode. The second time, which was last week, the installer kept hanging in bizarre places. The whole distribution just seems to be geared toward very simple hardware configurations and chokes at the slightest violation of its expectations.

Also consider a BSD, though.
eBay needs to get their act together. This is not their best marketing move...
I think there are many examples. A lot of my personal background is in database systems: off the top of my head, non-consumer oriented startups in that domain include startups that are trying to beat Oracle at transaction-processing (EnterpriseDB, MySQL AB to some extent), and a whole bunch of startups in the data warehousing area (Neteeza, Greenplum, ExtenDB, ParAccel, Datallegro, etc.) In data stream processing / complex event processing, there is StreamBase, Coral8, Apama (although they've been acquired by Progress), etc.). There are lots of hard, enterprise technology problems that haven't been solved very well, and that are ripe for entrepreneurs. There are similar problems in data integration, networking, virtualization, security, storage, DRM, etc.

And that's without even thinking about vertical markets. For example, I think if you sat down in a room with an industry expert in, say, the oil & gas industry and a few smart hackers, you could come up with a way to apply computer science to improve oil and gas prospecting. There are dozens of similar vertical markets, where some smart hackers with a modicum of domain-specific knowledge could really make a pretty significant improvement on the state-of-the-art, IMHO.

The group-think among certain communities on the Internet toward consumer-oriented, Web 2.0, advertising-dependent web startups is really pretty amazing -- I just get terribly bored reading about all the different people building Web 2.0 task management web apps and similar junk. There are lots of other kinds of startups out there -- it's just that YC doesn't focus on funding them, and TechCrunch doesn't cover them, so this particular community of developers never learns about them.
The point you are missing is that WoW becomes more enjoyable if its repetitive, mindless parts are automated. There would be no point to automating News.YC discussion or going out to dinner, but driving to work surely would be a candidate for automation for most people. The Skinner Box analogy is directly applicable to mindless, repetitive behavior like clicking to kill monsters over and over again, while thoughtful discussion does not fit into that category.

Similarly, you could create a robot to watch movies for you or go on dates for you, but there'd be no point, as you'd be missing out on the enjoyment. The statement about whether something can be automated refers not to mere physical possibility, but to whether it improves your subjective human experience. Thus you can't really automate watching movies or going out on dates because you can't have someone else live life for you. The benefit you gain is all in the experience of it, not the accomplishment of it.

The mindless activities these MMOGs subject you to are all of the accomplishment variety. Those shouldn't even exist, but if they do, they deserve to be automated. Then people enjoy the experience of being able to engage in the non-mindless activities.

The amount of scripting WoW allows is trivial compared to what you can actually do.
I LOVE THAT! What a brilliant piece to launch thier talents. Bravo! ;-D
If this is true it's a bad sign for eBay. Such heavy-handedness is always correlated with major suckage in the product.
Cogswell - sorry I don't have the link, but check Mark Andreesen's blog on the view of the dot com bubble and how over-hyped the failure rate was. He made some good points about how, despite all the lavish stories, a good number of companies made it through just fine.
fedora 7 FTW!
Ebay made the right call, I'd throw them out also if they pulled that nonsense...
YC: "unknown or expired link" -- fix it already
The "unknown or expired link" error message is getting annoying. I spent around 20 minutes
composing a reply, only to get the error message on submit. So I went back and reloaded
the comment I was replying to in order to get a "fresh closure", but since it wasn't a
top-level story I got the "unknown or expired link" message again. Luckily I copied the
textarea content so I could paste it in after going back to the top-level story.

Having to go back to the top-level story and reload just to be able to reply is a bug, not
a feature. If I open several stories in tabs, by the time I've read the first couple, I
might already be out of "closure clock" when I start writing my first reply.

I suggest you increase the number of closures from 20,000 considering YC traffic is
steadily increasing (which means they expire more and more quickly). If instead it's not
that you're running out of closures, but that you keep restarting the server (why?), just
dump your closure hash table to disk on shutdown and re-read it on startup. Basically,
make it work as well as every other, non-Arc discussion board on the planet for these very
basic operations.
their product
I've seen $7 on a $25 ticket, and that was a week in advance. Closer to 30% service fee. Needless to say, I went and bought it at the venue.
A product that builds ebay stores is nonsense? We are not that target but it might not be nonsense to those in that arena.
That is really cool.
I would appreciate some more constructive criticism about our product. Keep in mind it's just entering beta. What about it seems like nonsense to you?

Update: "sfo" appears to be a troll - his account was created 10 minutes ago.
All linuses are supposed to be rock-solid on a server. I went with Ubuntu because I figured it's not going away any time soon and because there seem to be more documentation available online.

We've been running 6.06 TLS with no problems for almost a year and just recently we moved our staging/production to 7.04 and we (as expected) are seeing no difference. We compiled apache and all libs we needed from source and never used apt-get for anything.

Besides, is it really important? IMO production server is just that: a production environment. You set it up just once and you're not supposed to mess around alot.
Pretty poorly phrased. The tips are good, but it took me a few passes to figure out what was meant. The title conveys the meaning to be: "You can't tell your team to 'leave it at home', 'always complain up, not down', or 'no gossip, ever'", when in fact those are the things you should be telling them.
On the referenced page, the banner is of a half-ass shot. Not exactly the image I'd want to convey...

http://www.appirio.com/downloads/google_gadgets.php
I think I tried to convey that exact sentiment to their VP at one point during that unpleasant encounter. And yes, it's a true story. The Auctomatics can vouch we were there :)
This has nothing to do with the product. They showed up with a plan to stir the pot... if it was for press then it looks like it might be working for them. Nicely done in that respect but don't pretend this was a huge coincidence.
Debian or Ubuntu LTS releases are fine. Avoid the usual Ubuntu releases, as their lifecycle is too damned short. Likewise for Fedora (if you like Red Hat based free systems, CentOS will do).

I wrote an article about this based on my experience with thousands of Webmin/Virtualmin/Usermin users:

http://www.obsceneart.com/?p=30
flamebait
That is the one thing that bothered me a little by the article. It looks like planned linkbait a mile away.
"IMO production server is just that: a production environment. You set it up just once and you're not supposed to mess around alot."

That's why you should have stuck with LTS. 7.04 will likely be EOL'ed in the next few months (unless they branch another LTS version of it), and then you'll be forced to upgrade under duress. Long life cycle is probably single most important factor in choosing a good server distribution, because "you're not supposed to mess around alot".
OK, will look into it. The right thing is probably to gc closures waiting for form submissions much more slowly.
A little Googling seems to indicate that amount is more than half the average yearly wage. Yikes!
It's true it was suspicious that they wore Google shirts. Every little startup I know of would wear their own shirts to a trade show.
How else should one try to write a startup's first blog post? You're right in noticing that a major goal of the article was to market our product, but that doesn't mean that any of it was made up. It's a true retelling of the events.
What are you using on your workstation? If you are using Ubuntu on your desktop, I would deploy Ubuntu on the server also. This allows you to combine your desktop and testing machines into one. Then, you only need a dedicated staging (virtual) machine and the production machine.

Otherwise, I also recommend CentOS, especially if your hosting provider lets you run it with SELinux enabled.
For the server use debian if you are going to use the server for anything serious, for your desktop you could use ubuntu. There is no reason IMHO that you would want to use ubuntu on a production server.
I tried to be pretty specific in the title by using "The Founder"
Just to clarify - only one of us wore a Google shirt. My co-founder was wearing business attire, so only I was singled out by the security personnel at first.

We don't yet have our own shirts and our appearance at the convention was spontaneous (planned the night before). I wore my Google shirt because our product uses Google Checkout and I wanted to show support for it as I felt it was dealt an unfair blow by eBay.