skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oregon doesn't seem to have some of the specialist infrastructure that's geared towards startups the way the Bay Area does. I'm looking for a law firm in Eugene, but none of the ones that I've talked to seem to be particularly aware of or competent in the areas I need them to have.

It's weird, in Portland there is at least enough density and activity that they get a sustained push and startups either get off the ground or go bust, Eugene seems to have a bunch of lifestyle companies that were formed elsewhere and moved here for the amenities. The only local company that broke the 100 employee barrier recently is sinking fast because they only ever had one customer, who decided to take things in house.

On paper, this town looks ideal; university, low cost of living, easily accessible to the west coast/I5 corridor, very livable friendly town, plenty of cheap commercial real estate if you need offices, a couple of decent sized datacenters if you feel a need to be close to the machines. Plenty of technically savvy people, and there are a few entrepreneurs locally, but the company building part of things seems to happen elsewhere.
... especially after calling most of his readers morons for believing that a job is the safest way to support themselves. And then there is the:

"If you find this site helpful, please leave a donation for Steve so you can enjoy the spirit of giving too."

which just seems crazy after what he said, but maybe he knows his audience well.
Of course the other side of that is the fairly common situation where someone in the team of 5 is doing 5x the work for 1x salary, and management has no idea until months (if ever) after they leave...
One thing the article didn't make real clear was that the new features are all standards compliant- in theory most other browsers will end up doing the same things (though IMO it would be nice if Mozilla stays ahead). Here is where you can see the web-programming landscape will look like in the next several years: http://www.whatwg.org/
The Dangers of Infoprefixation (or, More Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture)
Are these all the people who have talked at YC dinners? If so thats an incredible list of speakers.
I have friends that work at Y! that are the most talented programmers I know--however, when they recently had a startup idea, there was definitely a 'should we tell our parents?' consideration that wasn't shaken off until the startup had already been built (at least the beta).

That said, the code coming out of Y! lately has been excellent in quality and in pushing the web developer community forward (e.g. Yahoo! User Interface Libraries, Yahoo! Pipes) . . . but at such a massive company, that code is coming from a very small percentage of its employees, and features such as '360' seem very uninspired IMHO.

At the end of the day, there is a disturbing theme throughout this article: give some of our best talent the opportunity to leave the mill and work on something revolutionary, and maybe they won't leave in the first place or keep their ideas secret, and just maybe they won't mind if the compensation is rather dismal compared to what it could be--after all, we can protect them from what so many of them consider the greatest risk: jobless with an unsuccessful startup.

Maybe they should ask themselves why they are a mill in the first place?
Eugene and Portland are worlds apart. I don't think it's a coincidence that Nike split for Portland as soon as they got going. Starting a company in Eugene would be ok from certain points of view, but I don't think it's big enough to have critical mass in some areas. There are some good things happening in Portland, though. For instance:

http://www.opentechcenter.com/drupal/?q=
danielha - yeah, i think casting something quickly and have something to start with is far better than use a lot of time thinking for a grand scheme but to later on find out users won't bite to it.
Heard of Cebu City, Philippines?
Would just like to share to some of you that Cebu City, Philippines might be one of those places you would like to consider in finding partners for your endeavors.

I graduated from a university there and I joined NEC just after college. I can tell you there are a good number of good software engineers there. Thanks.
Startup Success 2006 [video] - with Guy Kawasaki, Reid Hoffman, Joe Kraus and more
and what does this have to do with startups?
As I said before, I don't think it can work (in Firefox) without a change in the code. Firefox's default security settings won't let you modify the content of html from another domain (I don't think...)
How To Lose Your Users and Kill Your Web 2.0 Company: Zoto
Google: Click Fraud Is 0.02% Of Clicks
If this is the question you are talking about:

"Leaving the files in S3 with global read perms would open up the possibility of a botnet attack whereby an attacker could simply request all your files continuously and thereby drain your bank account by using up bandwidth as fast as Amazon can deliver it. Is there any way to address this kind of abuse? Otherwise, agreed, serving directly from S3 would be a fine idea." (how do you do blockquotes, btw?)

then it doesn't really apply. If you have an EC2 instance running as your server, you aren't allowing global public access to your S3 data. You control bandwidth usage through your EC2 server the same way you would with any other server.

And I think that even with raw S3, there are ways, such as "use once URLs", that allow you to get around this problem.
Holy Crap. I can't stand that every div in Spotplex is pulling some other Ajax thing down. I had spinny indicators whirling at me like I was in a land of pinwheels.

And when I went in, the first 3 links to stuff was just some test posts or spam.

Answer: No.
At 8AM Central 3/1/2007 Reddit is still down.  I'm switching to Newsy!
What's newsy!?

"news.y"combinator.com
Oracle to buy Hyperion for $3.3b
joe is really inspiring - reality and never ending persistence.

side note - they way he speaks reminds me of my manager at NEC,
Cebu. such a deep philosophical person.
I wish there was some kind of hotline :(

Maybe someone should set up a Freebridge conference room where we can all figure out how to cope.
Om Malik slams the Oscars for their YouTube policy
Just thought it was interesting because I hold a similar view. I wasn't going to sit through 4-5 hours of nonsense to get to the only good parts (Best picture, actor, actress). If they'd made those clips available at ABC's or Oscars' website, I would've gladly watched the clips there. Instead I had to find and watch low quality stuff on YouTube. Way to embrace that technology.
it's back now. 9:43 EDT
Then I guess we're set! My co-founder and I, due to our amazing intellectual prowess, are each worth 1.045 normal people!
Pick a magazine on the rack and observe that most writers can't write. Most cabbies don't know their way around town, and a lot of barbers can't follow instructions when cutting hair.

Competence is in short supply all round.
I dont know. It's ok for a turnaround company, or a dispassionate outsider. Not for someone who is in the grind.
see my thread http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1464
see my thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1464
" * IP Filtering: Advertisers can block particular IP addresses that they think are fraudulent. When this happens, people coming from these IP addresses will not see ads."

Put me on the list! Now here's something there's a market for... [with apologies to those reading this who are relying on this as a major source of revenue]
How To Bring New Readers To Your Blog/site?
Exactly. You have control over the read-access permissions on any content on S3. Anything set to 'private' cannot be accessed by the outside world without a URL with an encrypted key salted with your private key and an expiration date. I am already doing this with my startup and it is a wonderful feature, with no fears of 'botnet attacks'.
No, but the benches are deadly.
The really good looking one is me.
Well, because it won't eliminate the junk messages vying for my attention, it will just earn me fake email currency for reading them. This does not help the overall goal of email overload.

If I trust the person sending the message, he/she can just use the "Priority" feature. If I don't trust him/her, then I don't see why messages with more virtual currency units are necessarily more important than those with less.
Asking All Young Entrepreneurs: Are You Absolutely Sick of College Yet?
A lot of them may have been from the startup school(s). Sacca, Wolfram, and Woz were speakers at the first startup school, and the dates on the audio files are right after it.
Only 1.045? ;-)
Delaware corporate franchise tax is due today (March 1st)
How do you build the perfect local community Web site
CRV Quickstart Facts: Those are some long odds.
"This article was written to make young entrepreneurs hate college or want to stop doing their school work to focus more on their business"

typo?
iSkoot Gets $7 Million in Venture Capital Funding
Ebay - Bebo partnership. Interesting monetisation option for social networks
Are You Paid Enough?
I don't access to the whole article, but that pretty much sums it up.
It's not about what you start, it's about what you finish
hehe, i was thinking the same thing when I wrote that :-)
Why Big Company Strategies Don't Matter to Startup Companies
From the tone of the article it seems like more of a Freudian slip than an outright typo.
Starting a Company is a Crap Sandwich
My college professor: "Startups are not real work, and starting a business is not rational."
Accidental clicks are 95% of Clicks.
Presentation on the process of gettting VC funding
Web 2.0 revenue models
markdown in javascript. (don't hit your server while doing a live preview)
7 questions from a vc to ask before joining a startup
I actually wrote about something similar last fall, so I just uploaded it to my homepage. It was actually an assignment for a business class, and the professor's comments are pretty funny:

http://alexkrupp.com/midterm.html
they are, like a seesaw
Insider Pages Acquired By CitySearch
May I ask what you are studying over there at Cornell?

I read your paper and the conclusion that you arrived at is reminiscent of an observation on young entrepreneurship in this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html. Starting a startup while you're still in school means that there is still an escape hatch. Just as you realized in your paper, if you fail, you are still a student, or "no worse off than before."

While I agree about the disjointedness of the paper, I think a rational-decision making model is absolutely applicable in an entrepreneurial sense if approached correctly.
Agreed. The main directory is from the first Startup School, held in Boston (Oct 05). The apr06 subdirectory is from the second Startup School, held at Stanford.
Good point. I don't really have a major, I'm just whatever random classes I find interesting or useful. I'm taking classes in business, education, English, comp sci, etc. I've taken enough classes to get an Applied Economics & Management degree if I want it, but I'm pretty ambivalent between doing that and just leaving it as interdisciplinary studies on my diploma.

Also, you're right about the PG essay. I've obviously learned a lot since that experience and will not be making the same mistakes next time.
I love my Python so I've got the plug the Python implementation too: http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/python-markdown/
Roaming random classes, learning what you find interesting? Sounds like you've got some young Steve Jobs in you. No flaw in that -- he went on to found some famous fruit company of sorts.
Outside.in's Steve Johnson wrote a fairly buzzed-about book about popular culture ("Why Everything Bad is Good for You"). He sounds like a bright guy with a handle on American society and the populous in general. I think he'll do great things with the new company.
Interview with reddit (part 2)
Morfik's Ajax Platform Set To Challenge Google, Adobe, Microsoft (Richard MacManus/Read/WriteWeb)
What would a completely transparent company be like? All resources, records, and processes available for comment (maybe modification?) by anyone. People that have run or are currently running startups could make suggestions on the business processes, the things going on in the company, and the products or services. Maybe the more eyes/fewer bugs idea applies to business?

I'm not sure of the full picture; It's an idea.

Cheers.
Klipboardz Blog - Using Emergence for Social News
I see what you're getting at. What I meant was, I work 50 hour weeks. During my spare time, I'm getting my business up and running. If I can ever be in a position which I can focus on my business full time without starving, then I'll do that. That'll happen right around when I save up $15k, or the business is successful. Just because there's no way out of my job doesn't make me not an entrepreneur :P
Moonlighter's Dilemma: Guide to Starting a Startup PartTime
New House leadership has lively Internet agenda
Scientists: Data-storing bacteria could last thousands of years
My situation exactly. Thanks for the advice.
Nope. Next question.
No mention of Aaron Swartz. Odd.
Free online version of Photoshop coming soon
Maybe feature requests should be a subreddit of its own? There's so much going on here, I can't tell if the feature on my mind is already mentioned.
I'd be nice to have permalinks of comments in the profile page, and ideally a notification when there's a reply.
Why pre-announce it? To prevent people from using competitors in the meantime. Why the need to do that? Because Adobe is genuinely afraid of those competitors.

MSFT used to do this a lot. It doesn't require you to actually have something in 6 months; if people wait, you've achieved your goal. I'm surprised Arrington bought it.
How To Become Rich From Making A Simple Video - Part 2
I don't believe they have 1400 applicants. I think that must be a misunderstanding; that may be the number of people who'd asked for info about it.
Capturing your start-to-be with a wiki
Internet Bubble 2.0
Perhaps Entrepreneurs Can Stay East After All
I think you're right- MA is great- but it seems no one was very impressed with the way they did rankings: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=1551
that doesn't solve the problem that I (and I assume others) habitually press the back button when I'm done perusing comments in order to get to the main page. At this point when I press the back button it goes to a slightly older version of the comments page- and various other oddities.
I could easily believe it was that high- Keep in mind, the program got a good deal of publicity, not just in the areas where you'd normally expect, bug Digg, etc...

I think the model they're doing is Damn clever; Had I the money, I'd love to be doing the same thing. YCombinator is a great program, but $70-150K is a lot more to get something running, and a good way to pull the cream of the new startups to you..

The startups don't have much to lose, since it's only a loan.. And you get a guaranteed right of first refusal on some hot goods.

It's a clever product, not just a marketing angle.
The Wizards of Buzz -- Influential users of social news
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.",  Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), The Note Book
One of my favourite stories. Especially the end: "We wanted to release a Windows version as part of Windows 98, but sadly, Microsoft has effective building security."
You probably have a better spirit than I do. I have [well over 15k], and really enough to live on for years without FTE, but I'm waiting until I actually have a revenue stream before quitting my job.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. You don't get smaller code by making it incomprehensible. It gets smaller because it's cleaner and clearer.

Think of the problem in terms of compression. You can compress via syntax or by semantics. In the first case you end up with gzip and an unreadable compact mess. In the second you end up with a better, more elegant program, expressed via core, largely orthogonal concepts. For some reason you seem to think that a good programmer works like gzip. That's simply wrong.
It's a bad time to start a company
Caterina's caveat... "I was talking here about consumer-facing Web 2.0 companies based in San Francisco and the Valley"

I think there are a lot of bad ideas floating around (http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html - Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas) but still, a bad time to start a company? A vibrant competetive market produces some of the best products, if nobody started a company when there was a lot of competition we'd be without Google (and many others). Thoughts?
Threadless and Vimeo fireside chat, part 2
OpenMoko - Can open source transform the mobile phone?
Should Digg Sue Wired News?
Gareth Knight, Technovated video interview - on differences between Silicon Valley and Europe, FOWA and sharing office space
More Anger! - Anger as a driver of product adoption
eBay partners with Bebo
So many great quotes and insights from this article:

"I hate being called a college dropout. It's like almost 10 years ago already. And I didn't drop out, I just decided to learn on my own.",
"i didn't drop out, i got kicked out, get it straight"

"I think it's underestimated how much work we put into it. Our success wasn't random - we work non-stop."

"Fact: The best ideas come from the bathroom."

"When i was out [in Silicon Valley,] every person i met gave me a business card that said CEO. It just seems like everyone is so up in each other's kool-aid they forget to just stfu and work."
These suggestions resemble a lot the advice given to new assistant professors on how to find time for research among all the teaching, committees, etc. Strange to find it here... But #4 is very relevant (no offense YC News!).
Can we get the ability to see what we've liked and where we've commented from our profiles please? I keep forgetting where I've commented and what that awsome article I liked was.

Also bug report. When I enter some characters in comments such as  and  it goes a bit funny.
It's tempting to do that, but check this out. I sat down and created a spreadsheet, listing all my monthly debts (including food). I then said, "Okay, I will go out on foot and pitch 10 teachers per month to use my service, resulting in $100 / month increase in revenue." In the spreadsheet, you'll be able to predict your total cost per month, and the month that revenue exceeds debt, the total cost is how much money you need to start your startup. But one last thing: Whatever your debt is, double it per month. Whatever you predict your revenue will be, cut that in half. I came to a total of $15k, because I have small debts since I'm 19. But it really puts into perspective just how little it costs to start a startup.

By the way, what's your startup?

Shawn
I am finishing up my last semester of Business School and I just sit in class reading Popurls.com while teachers ramble on and on. I have learned so much more about entrepreneurship, history, news, world status, and everything else than my classes could possibly teach me. I am just glad all this training to be a sheep will be over soon.
Would you be willing to tell us what your startup did? :)

Shawn
That isn't the same. He carefully applies pressure to one side of the robot, and the robot starts walking in that direction.
Excellent story, though I must admit I have read it before. I always wonder will history judge us the same way we judge them? Will the entrepreneurial spirit that is pervasive in hacker circles today be a positive or negative blip in the history of technology, economy, etc?
I certainly believe that it is for the better. Though not all startups may end well, the advances in ideas, and the experience gained by the individuals involved as well as the spectating world, should prove to be a positive note in our history.
And now back to work ;)
A full-time startup project might mean 12+ hours a day. In that scenario it doesn't really hurt to spend the first few hours "getting in the zone" or "wasting time". If you only have a 3 hour slot then a couple non-productive hours can be crippling.
Interactive multitouch cocktail bar [video]
Yeah, it can be crippling.

But once, I went a whole week sleeping 3 hours a day. I'd spend from 11-7 at work, then 8 PM - 7 AM on my startup, sleep 'til 10, repeat. I loaded up on NoDoz. After that week, I got a horrible cold, and was knocked out for the week after that (though I still went to work), but in the meantime I got a large number of features done.

My point is, if you have the drive and commitment, you will *find time*, even if your situation is biased against finding time.

Shawn
iShopr - Part 1 - Screenshots of the real thing
How to make a successful start-up
OR just start a blog....
None of her arguments are convincing. In particular, it doesn't matter how many other people are starting startups. It's not as if there's some limit to the total number of startups that can succeed.
These talks are from the first two startup schools, not YC dinners. However, I believe all of them except Wozniak have spoken at YC dinners as well.

These are the dinner speakers this (winter) batch: http://ycombinator.com/w7speakers.html
The website is actually down but here was the elevator pitch:

"Emoticomm is a digital introduction device. Our stick-of-gum sized device uses Bluetooth to connect people with similar desires. We use proven hardware and open source software.

It's a shame how many missed opportunities exist because of difficulty in initial icebreaking.

For example, imagine two strangers in an elevator with only 30 seconds to potentially establish a relationship. Our product will discretely alert them to common interests.

We're targeting venues such as conferences, trade shows, and cruiseships. Our goal is to create a more efficient social experience.

Our product is a digital icebreaker. Digital handshakes will lead to physical ones."

You can see two mockups here, one of the product and one of the GUI:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/picture_library/3Dmodel.png

http://www.alexkrupp.com/picture_library/gui.png

(The idea behind the GUI was that info in green boxes would be public, info in yellow boxes would be viewable by friends of friends, and info in red boxes would be viewable by friends only)

It was a decent idea but I guess I wasn't clued in enough to realize that I have no where near enough skills to pull off a hardware project. At least I learned a thing or two...
P.S. I just threw the business plan and marketing plan online.

http://www.alexkrupp.com/biz_plan.pdf

http://www.alexkrupp.com/marketing_plan.pdf

They actually won a couple of business plan competitions, so they're not completely terrible if you want an example. Plus maybe someone will get a good idea or two.

I also have a provisional patent on the above designs plus some new business methods relating to advertising that is going to expire in a few months... *sigh*
It takes an extraordinary amount of drive to keep trying in the situation described, but where does that drive come from?

Do you have a vision of something that "needs" to be done and you just have to find out how to do it? ... Or are you driven by a need to do something, anything, but you still don't know what?

At some point these combined forces overwhelm you, you must risk everything and there will be no going back. Nor does success, however you measure it, bring relief because the goal posts keep moving.
For Digg to sue Conde Nast would be a complete waste of time. There's no obvious cause of action, and even if they managed to find one, the damages are inconsequential.

Also, this blogger's English is nearly incomprehensible. And I thought even Micros~1 had figured out that smart tags are a horrible idea.
Here are all the notes from 2006:

http://notelab.infogami.com/startupschool2006

And here is a zipped file of the 2005 notes:

http://www.alexkrupp.com/startup_school_05_notes.zip
um, why the mod-down... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
skrbl: easy to share online whiteboard
BitTorrent's Big Play