skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0, SQL Server 2005, Web Services ... 5 years experience working with Microsoft technologies such as Asp.net, ASP or SQL Server ..."

all the great hackers are lining up for this one.

"... As a result we will be building up a large team of 20 to 30 employees over the next few months. ..."

Missed that one, why so large?

"... Having built systems that take orders and credit card transactions previously is a strong plus ..."

MS for RT systems. Do-able but not pretty.
I agree. I like the iPhone. I use mine every day. But I've noticed this trend to make everything developed for it look and feel "like a real iPhone app" and not pay attention to other browsers. Why not develop for the web and make it look and feel like whatever it needs to look and feel like?

YC News, for instance, is very usable on the iPhone. Not surprisingly, Paul Graham's essays fit the screen perfectly. Neither seem to have been specifically designed for the iPhone, but bother work well because they are designed well.
"... At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours ..."

When I read that I think someone is working out the cost per person per square meter and saying to themselves we pay for that floorspace and nobody is using at night or it can be done cheaper. Lets get rid of all but the core and let them work elsewhere.
"This is Steve Ludmer, Co-Founder of Sunday.

First of all, I want to thank the many readers who have emailed me personally with feedback and the new members who continue to sign up.

If anyone is intrigued by our concept and wants to see if we can help create time and enhanced mobility in their lives, I encourage you to use the promotional code: MOBILITY. Using this promotional code will allow you to try our service for FREE for 1 month, no strings attached. "

http://venturebeat.com/2007/07/27/sunday-gives-you-personal-...
It may be worth noting that other well-established companies like Your Man In India have been offering remote personal assistant services for some time. Timothy Ferriss' "The 4-Hour Work Week" has an entire chapter on how to outsource your life to India. Pretty entertaining. $30/mo is an attractive price point, though.
Were you offered funding for ClutterMe.com ? Was that based on the content you presently have on your site?
It looks fairly well done. I prefer the random bag method of piece generation. Also, the movement of falling pieces is a little touchy--sideways movement can sometimes generate a double movement and sometimes no movement.
However, if you play around with the game on meatbrick.com a bit longer, you'll see there is more to it than a Tetris clone.
I did consciously keep Startup News simple because I knew a news site would be something a lot of users viewed on handheld devices. I didn't plan for the iPhone specifically, but they all have small screens.
College will kill your entrepreneurial spirit: A 9 year old's foray into startups.
Man, just because you can afford to hire a bunch of folks does not mean you should.

Good luck to Markus. I'd be cautious with the idea of going from one person shop to hiring dozens of people quickly.
All true, but the paper included graphs of women's "productivity" over time too, and the dropoff was nowhere near as severe after peak childbearing years. If it were just a matter of time spent taken care of kids, you'd expect women to suffer a larger output decline, as the bulk of childrearing duties falls on them.
What percentage of a company do you look to take?
I like the one point these guys made about putting emphasis on finding co-founders who have previously worked on their own side-projects, before people wanted to pay them to do something.
I don't think any website can strengthen your connections with friends; you have to do that yourself. That said, if I wanted to invite a friend over for tea, I can:
1. Email
2. Call his/her cell
3. IM
4. Leave a message on the FB wall.

I don't like to do 2 or 3 because they are real-time or require availability. For me, there's no difference in 1 or 4.
Yes - played a bit more now. Funny idea. Number 3 touched my heart. I don't know waht random bag is - I suppose it assures that certain tiles appear after a certain time?

The touchy movement appears when you repeatedly hit a movement key instead of just holding the key down. I optimized for holding key down to have a fluid movement (no delay at the start of movement like i.e. in your Tetris).
But it seems everybody is so used to this flash bug(?) that they keep hitting the buttons :(
They should fund me because my company is a money winning proposition with the $10,000 my partner and I put up but we could scale much more quickly with a real investment.

We can't get any money from the traditional biotech establishment without patents. And we can't get patents until we have some money because most of our patentable ideas will require more expensive lab equipment than we have right now. So for now, we try and make some money by bootstrapping and selling incense, then we get the patents, then we get the real money, then we start the interesting research like curing AIDS which offers a multi-billion dollar payoff.

My company is selling a a genetic test for HIV immunity. With funding, we could expand into other genetic tests very quickly and get FDA approval for as much as we can. FDA approval is not required to sell a "home-brew" genetic test but you can charge a lot more money if you're FDA approved because then insurance will pay for it.It won't take much to dramatically undercut all the existing genetic tests on the market, they're all really overpriced.

For now, I'm enjoying the process of bootstrapping and approaching biotech with the Web 2.0 "make it yourself" ethos.

Seedcamp told me they don't do biotech. Techstars sticks to Web 2.0 function companies. CRV doesn't do biotech. HCP does biotech and has a summer program targeted to college students for it. We didn't get in and they didn't tell us why, though it was still a really nice rejection and they invited us to a barbecue at their office.

YC might fund biotech if they liked you enough but they aren't a good fit for me. The biotech incubator geographically close to me is dumb and I won't give them any control of my company. They're one of those state-subsidized institutions that repeatedly lose money. This is why Pittsburgh sucks for entrepreneurs, because despite the brilliant biotech minds coming out of our universities, there is not nearly enough investment money available.

I should probably email Tandem and ask if they do biotech. Anyone know any seed stage funding firms/incubators that would consider biotech?
This site wasn't built by a great hacker so he doesn't care about hiring great hackers. I doubt Markus would want to switch architectures so an elite lisp hacker that will refuse to work on MS isn't what Markus wants.

The design is even worse and sometimes the site's UI doesn't even function. The girls are much uglier/less successful than match.com or OKCupid too, there's probably some explanation for that.
Blockbuster acquires Movielink
Blockbuster, one of the nation's largest video-rental companies, has acquired Movielink, a video-on-demand service owned by five of the top six movie studios.
There's an interesting bit at about 28 minutes about working with PG.
all the great hackers are lining up for this one

Hmm. Yeah, he's processing millions and millions of requests a day off of one web server. I really don't think that (ahem) great hackers like having the power of MSFT technology thrust in their face.
I mused with my partner whether archaic browser support was a form of premature optimization. Some things are easy and can be wrapped in a function to make them simpler. Others, not so much. I don't plan on testing in more than 6 browsers/versions on the 3 big platforms before release.

Thoughts?
Email Attachments Are So Uncool
When it Comes to Social Media Websites, the Long Tail Doesn't Apply
Good luck on demo day, guys!
I don't know all the teams, but I'm hoping my boys the Dropboxers do well.
The 80:1 Freakonomics Paradox
why so large?

20 employees wouldn't be completely unreasonable. Not all of them would be straight up coders, of course. Then again, with the traffic numbers he claims, I think he could justify having half the engineering power as someone like Facebook.
Although you've got to give him credit with what he has achieved so far with MS technology. I always wondered why did he use it in the first place though....on a related note yeah I've noticed that there are some inconsistencies with the UI. It wouldn't hurt for him to try to correct that.
Guy Kawasaki Talks About Making Meaning with Your Business
video of Guy talking about startups and stuff
I give him a lot of credit for what he's done. I would assume he used MS tech because that's what he was familiar with.
I would imagine you have some influence here. You could require investors to get word out to people within a short deadline or face the penalty of non-participation in the first funding round and potentially a disinvite to future demo days. Maybe too harsh, though.
Nothing. I just try to eat healthy food, excercise regularly, get enough sleep, and be around stimulating people. Caffeine makes me irritable, and since I've made it almost 30 years without trying a cigarette I have no intention of trying one any time soon.

Sometimes I record myself at the piano while I'm drinking, and then go back later and extract any of the good ideas. I've never had any luck coding drunk, though.
Great blog and a fascinating literary experiment.
JS/AJAX: Modal Box for popups and wizards
You know, he's that man on the street with a fur coat, feather in a wide-brimmed hat, fat pinky ring...
Light, but only natural sunlight. Darkness is better than ugly green fluorescents/ugly yellow incandenscents.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html :)
How much is 100 Percent of a Company with No Value Worth?
I sometimes tell investors that kind of thing. And certainly they know that if they maltreat any YC startup, they won't get any more deals in the future.

But the thing that really motivates investors (and acquirers) is competition. That's why we try to bring so many investors to demo day. (Today there are so many coming that we had to get a tent for the founders to stand in while they're not presenting, because there's not really room for everyone in the building.)
How Google Works: Distributed, Lightweight Clusters of Low-Cost Commodity Servers
not really seen anyone properly blogging stuff this round like Boso crew did last time, apart from a few posts from Remember Me
To build a social network. would you use off the shelves (like joomla) or build from scratch?
The piece kept me reading, but I couldn't disagree more with this part:

"...College does not turn people into free thinking individuals who will someday have the whole world at their feet. It turns them into worker bees that will spend their lives in cubicles just so long as they get 2 weeks paid vacation time per year."
The venture capital king of Europe
MySQL Takes Another Step (Away from Open Source)
Is YouTube unique with bandwidth requirements? I hear they were burning through millions even early on.
Does Newsvine support this? I'm not a Newsvine user (I waste more than enough time reading Startup News!), but I think that Newsvine allows you to set up a personal feed, so that people who think you're a good editor can follow your feed.

Not sure about how you might go about setting up a small-group feed a la BoingBoing, where you and your twenty cronies collaborate to edit the news.
Naval on the Age Question: You Create for Sex
Do you live under the fear that a YC company is about to demo what you working on?
do you under the fear that a YC *tup is gonna demo what you workin on?
Can You Build a Startup Ecosystem Outside the Valley?
It's nice to be able to look away from a computer screen to think. So facing monitors and a window at the same time is ideal. I find this setup good for day or night, and have a similar setup at home. I took a quick picture to show what I mean.
http://flickr.com/photos/ikirigin/1061406827/

I constantly have headphones on. Sometimes without music -- lowering interruptions.
No, don't worry about someone else making something. Worry about how fast you can make it yourself. Worry about your community of users. But try to keep track of your competition.
Great Socially-Networked Color Chooser from Adobe Labs
What about it do you disagree with?
I agree with this, but after you have the framework to do this, I think, the more difficult part is how to present it.

Say you create a news site. You place the obvious largest sections in the obvious places, like the sorting options "new" and "hot." Now you want to accomodate all your user-created sections too. Where to put this?

You could create a cyclic box that just grabs particularly active user sections, but for oldtimers this would be inefficient. You could create a friends section kind of box that displays links to friend pages for logged in users, but that is potentially confusing and would compete with whatever top level links you initially have.

I believe it isn't so hard technically for reddit to open up user-created subreddits, but how to integrate it into the UI is what's hard. If you have a good solution, I'd like to hear, for the obvious reason. :)
cookout at the anybots/yc office
One of the few things I accomplished at anybots was to organize a weekly BBQ at the office every wednesday...

Well, because of demo day, I thought I'd reschedule next week's BBQ to saturday (the 18th), and invite some News.YCers. Trevor says the YC crew will still be in town, so some of those guys might show up as well...

Space is limited - I can't afford to cook for more then about 10. RSVP here. Cookout starts @ 12:30, arrive early if you want to hack / chill / check out the robots / whatever. Dexter & Monty will be serving the food.

UPDATE: Please, no schmoozing. Don't come if you're only interested in pitching your business.
Watch out for gazeons. They are particles produced by gazing on-lookers -- especially by important people. Most demos are tested with only a few participants, limiting the ambient gazeon level.

Without proper gazeon shielding, the demos might be friend by the number of potential investors in the room.

I learned all this from Hod Lipson, a really smart guy
http://www.mae.cornell.edu/lipson/
Build your own. The thing to keep in mind with social networking is that it should not be the only draw of your website, but should be an added feature that makes the draw of your website more interactive. Also, I just completed a site that includes social networking, and it was so much easier to integrate with the focus of the website, because I built it from scratch.
> open it up so anyone can create their own social news community...

You just described how blogs work.
They have some strange old media connections (clear channel and ticketmaster) that will probably be both helpful and destructive.
Indeed. Or, actually, I've only smelled them as the can is opened; I don't think I've ever actually eaten any. But I understand that lots of people like sardines -- it was suppose to be merely funny. :)
It's unreasonable to go from 1 or 2 people to 20 in a short period of time. If he did the hiring over a year then it would be much more manageable.
Mental note: Don't take on a "business" partner.
the technology park/corridor concept won't make it happen. building a "funky" building and slapping the incubator tag on it doesn't work. i belive it can only happen organically. you can't force it. it's not like making soup.
If you could have Dexter make a delivery to my office in Boston, that would be delightful.
Beautiful Code - Author Interview with Andy Oram and Greg Wilson
There's merit to the idea that college typically does not foster an entrepreneurial spirit, as the prevailing assumption is that you'll go on to apply for a job. Still, I think the author is seriously underestimating the value of going to college, which Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address addresses nicely:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-06150...

Of course, whether or not to stick around until you get your degree is another matter. But I'd argue that much of what you learn about the world, culturally, historically, theoretically, can be invaluable to entrepreurship.
('I can't make it' thread)

I can't make it, but thanks for putting it on.
Build an Infinitely Scalable Infrastructure for $100 Using Amazon Services
ooma on sale today
If I was demo-ing, I'd hire girls to ask cute questions and clap whenever something went right.
anyone care? i don't think i do. at least not today.
There was a great article on news.YC the other day about some of intuit's reasons for success. This quote stuck in my mind:

"Your competition isn't other companies, but the way things are done now"

There were like dozens of other companies working on personal finance software, and the intuit founder instead concentrated on his biggest foe: pen and paper. And hey, if it's a big enough market, it can support many different companies!
Speaking of which, is loopt so far the only YC-funded startup with a female on the crew?
Is there a place where someone can live-blog demo-day?
Number of Investors. Presentation Time. I offer upvotes, but you'd also be providing a service and be henceforward referred to as 'champion' instead of your real name by me and several others.
Wow - Clown Co. Got That $1 billion Valuation (still nameless though)
I second this motion -- there seem to be some fascinating ideas this session (not to mention some slick design!)... Good luck!
Idea: invite the companies most-likely-to-acquire YC Startups to demo day.
It is a bad idea to pretend you're disinterested in acquisition. That is the consensus, right?

If potential acquiring companies are invited, the conversation could be started early.

One drawback might be tipping your competition off to the ideas, but that seems to be a smaller threat than obscurity, right?
This is probably related to the question I asked about recording talks. Privacy frees conversation, or so the theory goes.
Tandem is funding our company. At first I had reservations about a hands-on approach: "I'm an independent, iconoclastic programmer! Just give me my money and get out of my way!"

Now that I am over my ego, I have really come to appreciate the fact that I have to give minimal thought to legal, accounting ... etc. It is also really nice to get immediate assistance with strategic, technical and networking (social, not computer) issues.

I would be happy to answer any questions people have about our experience with them. Either here or via email (richcollins@gmail.com).
Yes, that's what I need and pretty much what webpy feels like to me.

If I were to switch to anything else, I'd probably try plyons first.
Sure I do. And I really worry if I find out that someone has done stuff well and completely when I've barely started.

But other than that, competition often just validates a market. God knows Google didn't care that Infoseek, Excite, and Altavista already existed. Obviously they were doing it wrong.
Facebook Addresses BNP Problem
nope, Heysan has Marie
Apple Kicks Microsoft Where It Hurts
me (jamiequint), sumon (sharpshoot), and tim will be there :D
there are caffeine pills that are cheep as dirt.
There's also thousands of lab mice that have proven it.. but whatever works for you.
Thanks for the invitation -- I'll be there!
Agreed. One of the reasons it works here in SF CA is because of the type of people we attract -- and have been attracting for 150+ years. Do-it-yourselfers, iconoclasts, vagabonds, that type of person. Twain, London, those guys. Seriously. It takes an adventurer to want to build a startup, and for whatever reason, CA attracts those types.

Obviously that's not the only reason, but I think it's a factor.
man do I hate paypal.
Sure. How we add sweat is very subjective and is much easier to answer in context of a particular business. It tends to be very clear on all sides by the end of our first meeting. That being said, here is a high level answer and a couple of examples...

We are entrepreneurs, and as such just do what is needed. If we don't believe we can add value to a business, we don't get involved. We insist that the founders control the various aspects of the business, but we also look for opportunities that need our support on a day-to-day basis in the beginning. Once the business has some level of traction, we step back and make ourselves available when and where you need us (including help on large strategic deals or even to sell the business). If you don't need or want our help and are only looking for money, we are not the right fit.

The key elements in execution are - the right thing to do, the right time to do it and the right way to do it. We participate with the founders to help make these decisions on both the technology and business sides. We help where needed on strategy, marketing, bus dev, and tech architecture and provide the infrastructure needed on the administrative side (legal, finance, pr, etc.).

Couple of real life examples. In one of our businesses, certain technical scalability issues were identified and the question was how to solve them and when to solve them. We got involved and were a valuable resource for the founders as we understood the business objectives, development resources and the underlying technology. If need be, we can tune queries and look at code, but most of the time acting a good sounding board is all that's required.

In another case, there was a key question on the initial go-to-market approach for the business. Here, we brought people from other related organizations to the table to help in our decision. We worked with them and the founders to make an informed choice. So far, the results have been very positive...
I wish someone would steal my idea because then I could partner with them. It's so hard to find cofounders these days as we all know.
Just that college, for me, was the opposite of this vocational training ground. It was this beautiful, theoretical, pure learning environment that discouraged placing limits on what you could do with your life.

Now, sure, some people enter the cube farm (and stay there) right after college, but I don't think it was college that made those people do that. I think it was everything else (e.g., family, the desire to have material things, the need to be "normal", etc).
Why not? I don't think Steve would say that it was a mistake to partner with Alexis. There's a lot more to a startup than just the tech stuff.

I think a better lesson to learn from Reddit might be "Don't take a technical partner who decides he wants to be a sociologist 3 months in."
"As a final note, coasting may not be the best choice in overly demanding classes or those where grading is based on objective measures, such as multiple-choice or mathematics."

I study math. Our grades are not very objective. But maybe that's because we only have oral examination and we do not have to do much arithmetic.
Dexter? Seriously? Does he have arms now?
As entrepreneurs, we value our sweat and take a founder-like common stake for our participation. In a way, you can view working with us as adding another founder to your team, although you drive the day-to-day operations, and we help where and when needed. The exact common stake we take varies by opportunity. The $850K is invested at standard valuations in exchange for preferred stock. Again, if you don't need or want our help and are only looking for money, we are not the right fit.