skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just the venues that hate scalping, it seems that most people do too.

For me at least, scalping seems "evil" because it's charging a lot for something of little inherent value -- if I had just logged in 10 minutes earlier than you, I could have had your ticket for 1/10 the price.

A better system in my mind (one that ticketmaster had the leverage to implement) would be a point system - if I purchase a ticket for a sold-out concert, and it turns out that I can't go, I should be able to get my money back AND nab a spot in the pre-sale queue for the next popular concert coming to town.

That way, I still get my great ticket, but I'm not setting an arbitrary value based on demand.
"every time I approach a hacker about starting a project and bring up the subject of my contributions to the business end and also me being a source of ideas and creativity, they are instantly turned away, and essentially treat me as someone who would be useless as far as the development of the product..."

It depends on what kind of impression you make. Frankly I am a bit tired of creative people who can't get things done. I am not implying you are one of them, just giving you a reason why techies may be discouraged.

Good article on the subject:
http://www.tonywright.com/2007/5-reasons-you-dont-want-to-partner-with-an-idea-guy/
dude, that's like punchcards, right? :)
Life doesn't always happen in the 'ideal' order...

What if you do start before you are married and aren't successful? I know of people who became successful only after their 10th failed company....
good job buxfers!
Here it is. Google's achilles heel. They rely heavily on some of their competitors for revenue. Advertising will get in the way of technical innovation and head on competition.

Get out there young entrepreneurs! Google might still be the big leader in search, but their domination of all the commerce and information on the internet is certainly not guaranteed. They have enormous conflicts of interest.
http://www.shoppingsegment.com
shoppingsegment
I'd describe pg more as the french man who pulls out one frog every now and then. To fame and fortune, we are led to believe...
"Entrepreneurs: Use Birth Control."
Isn't there a YC company doing this sort of thing?
"No. Email does a better job. I don't want to have yet another medium to check and use."

Many times I'd rather call someone up, but I may only have their email. Point is, there are usually always better alternatives. However, choices make the end goal more possible than it might have been.
It's their Achilles heel until it isn't, ya know? Microsoft was the software company with invaluable relationships creating products for, say, Apple, until that relationship wasn't as crucial to their being anymore.

But I definitely agree on your sentiments about the conflicts of interest. There's a lot of things to consider.
The Future of Web Apps, October 2007, London - Registration now open inc Student and Early Bird tickets!
It would be interesting to see a comparison of traffic received via reddit and del.icio.us. Not just in terms of page views but quality too. How many of the visitors subscribe to RSS, sign up, view other articles or buy something?
I can't get this to work. I tried to delete this comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17545 because it includes my email address. But, I don't see any link for deleting it.
What is the best way to create your own embeddable widgets? (to be placed on blogs, social networks)
Vibe is often the single thing that differentiates a successful company from an unsuccessful competitor. The worst is "fake vibes", things constructed by corporations to look like collaboration and a good vibe that are really just manufactured.

It goes way beyond free food and ping pong. Is management on your side? Do they listen to your concerns and desires as an every day employee? Are you lied to regularly? Is everyone proud of their work?
who is this guy? what company did he start?
Yesterday someone handed me a few thousand bucks.
What's interesting is that all the hype surrounding the explosive viral growth for Facebook apps such as iLike doesn't acknowledge a possible cost. Acquiring 4 million users isn't strictly additive, if it comes at the cost of cannibalizing your existing Web site visitors.

At first, I thought that iLike would only be able to monetize their Facebook users by driving them to their Web site. So, a big drop in Web site traffic seemed disastrous.

However, I see now that iLike is showing ads on their "Music Challenge" page within their Facebook app, so driving traffic doesn't seem necessary. (I'm assuming iLike is collecting this advertising revenue. Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

That's the real question then: How easy is it to monetize Facebook users? Is a Facebook user (who never visits the iLike Web site) just as valuable to iLike as a Web site user? If a Facebook user is less valuable, how many more Facebook users than Web site users would iLike need to come out ahead?
If you have a wife and/or family, keeping the day job can very well be the most responsible thing to do.
Yesterday someone handed me a few thousand bucks. It was a potential investor I had spoken too a couple of months ago, and yesterday out of no where they cut me a check. It was the weirdest feeling. I felt validated, optimistic, fearful, all at once. I loved it. For those of you who have received any type of funding for the first time from an outside source, did you feel the same?
Anatomy of a worthless business proposition
Internet advertisement spending data
Many times I expect those people would prefer an email as it doesn't interrupt them and they can deal with it in their own time. There's a balancing act between convenience to the caller and inconvenience to the callee.

The free text box in the profile lets the user give an email address, or their home page, or anything else including their phone number. The point is, they can limit how you can contact them. I don't think adding private messages on news.yc helps.
What if we wait until it comes out and someone has used it and then start reviewing its features?
I suspect, like edit, you can only delete relatively new things. Otherwise, users get narked one day and go around and delete all the posts they ever made, to the detriment of the whole.
we asked Mark Zuckerberg at Startup School
A combination of JavaScript, iframes, and Flash.
I meant reading it as you (re)write it.
But right now, ebay is enough of a customer that google (even with all its growth and revenue) can't risk competing with them.

That's something of a market inefficiency. But, I agree, it's one that may close quickly.
Yes, like on reddit.
A bit of semantics: what we are talking about here is the difference between statically typed and dynamically typed languages, not strongly and weakly typed. Python is strongly dynamically typed. Java is strongly statically typed. C is (arguably) weakly statically typed (because it let's you treat anything as anything through casts, void pointers, etc).

The point jey was trying to make is that only languages that are both statically typed and compiled can catch missing methods. Consider for example a piece of code:

a.doB();

If the language is not statically typed, then the compiler does not know the type of "a" at compile time, and therefore doesn't know what class to check for method "doB". This is why even if you were to compile python you would still end up getting missing method error messages occasionally.
How necessary is it to have a lawyer incorporate you?
it cost me $4 for a $30 ticket. That's a service fee of ~13% for an automated process!
So, I need to incorporate my startup. After some research I'm pretty sure I want to be a Delaware C Corporation so I can sell later.

A friend of mine, a corporate lawyer, is interested in funding my startup and providing the initial legal services, but there are a few big catches: this guy is extremely difficult to deal with (history of mental illness) and doesn't seem to know much about the issues surrounding startups. I had to explain to him why I want to be a C corp, and I'd think he should already understand that.

My intuition obviously tells me to avoid this guy if I can help it, but here's the real problem: I'm a complete bootstrap startup and I have to pay the bills in San Francisco. If my friend doesn't incorporate me, I'll have to use one of those incorporation websites - I can't afford to actually pay a lawyer to do it. Am I insane to even consider this option?
Wow, this is great news. Not the crashing and destroying your data part, but that they're porting OpenOffice in the first place. I'm using it in X11 now, can't wait for this to be stable.
Web 2.0: Make Wallpapers For Your Cell Phone
Any studies showing the effectiveness of AdSense?
How effective is AdSense? Having read recently about people buying google ads and having issues with their money "wasted" (I'm quoting) on AdSense placement (ads showing up on other people's websites, where people are not clicking on them as much or not at all), I am curious if there have been any attempts to measure the effectiveness of AdSense.

Personally, if I ever pay Google, I'd want my ads to show up on google.com only (something they discourage you to do) but I'd be glad to be wrong.
The Loose Reins on U.S. Teenagers Can Produce Trouble or Entrepreneurs
Interesting article about how the lack of structure in the US (often cited as a problem in education) may actually be a boon to teens who are more interested in finding their own path.

One line surprised me a bit, though: "Ben also cited outsourcing, in this case the ability to buy cheap programming from abroad, as helping business start-ups."

Cheap server space and productive programming languages help a lot, of course... but how many people here involved in start-ups would say that offshored application development has been an important factor in starting business?
that sounds like an absolutely TERRIBLE idea.

dealing with competent lawyers is bad enough, do not subject yourself to what will amount to a miserable experiment in futility just because he's the only lawyer you know.

if you need money (first off ask yourself what you actually need money for), get someone with money who will let you do your thing

to set up the C-crop, you SHOULD use a lawyer. ask friends or friend's of friends for recommendations. get a lawyer who will charge a flat fee, ours is only charging us $750 to issue the stock/create the bylaws/etc. use a bigname incorporation service to actually incorporate you in delaware if you have not yet done so (we used www.ctadvantage.com, cost us like $900 but only because we were stupid and had started off as an LLC and then decided to switch to C-corp).

the mental-illness dude does not sound like he can help you with either money or legal matters and will be more trouble than he's worth. STAY AWAY FROM HIM

hope this helps
It seems like your gut is telling you not to do it, and I agree.

Run. Run far away from this guy.

Now for the rational explanation: What is he offering besides money? It's nice that he is willing to give you money, but does he have any contacts or experience or skills that might put you in a better position? Doing something just because you are cash strapped is a horrible idea.

There was a good convo here a while back for lawyers with software start up experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16419
pg uses WSPR in SF and Goodwin Procter in MA.
thanks, bryan!
If all you want to do is incorporate and you are going to be the sole shareholder, you can do it via an Internet service. Lawyers are useful if you need anything more complex than this e.g., agreements for the initial shareholders, stock options agreements, etc.

If all you're doing is creating a corporation for legal protection, then do it yourself.

One word of advice though, think through how many shares you want to issue. If you're going to offer stock options, then issue a huge number - like 10 million. If you don't think you'll need options, then go for just a few.

If you pick too few now, you'll need to hire a laywer in the future to help you with a stock split or share issue to increase the number of shares.

Also, one other word: if you're just incorporating for yourself and don't plan on getting any venture funding in the foreseeable future, incorporate as an LLC so you can pass the tax losses from your company on to your personal taxes.
I recently created DedaSys as an LLC in Oregon for the grand total of $55. I will probably have to do more research and spend more of my own time to make sure things are done properly, and that I don't miss anything, and I'm sure I'll have an accountant do the taxes. However, I actually didn't mind the research, being the kind of person who likes to know how things work. I'll probably spend some of the money saved on books (or, even better, maybe I'll check some books out of the library when I'm home this summer).

Remember, you can always transform an LLC into a C corporation at a later date. To me it made sense to start small, and only spend that money when I'm sure I need it.
When you sign up for AdWords, you can decide to display your ads on content sites. It's literally a box that you uncheck, and then you are on google.com search only.

Purchasing AdWords and optimizing it is a science in and of itself. goodkeywords.com provides a useful tool for researching different potential key words. Then you can use G's sandbox or the Overture key word pricing to project ROI. You want to shoot for at least a 1% conversion rate on the AdWords advertising.

I have been out of this area for a couple months, but send me an e-mail if you have other general questions. Maybe I can help out.
I not convinced she's actually used facebook.
Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role
Favicon for news.ycombinator
Hi there. Really selfish post but I'd quite like it if news.ycombinator could provide a favicon. The only reason for this is so that my bookmarks toolbar doesn't have to have any text just icons for each site. Sorry it's a bit OCD but it'd really make my day. Cheers.
Google has tried to solve this with the Google Web Toolkit.

Robust Web 2.0 functionality, but backed by rigid static type checking and unit testing. This provides sound software engineering practices for large projects with many developers involved.
URLs in the profile are live.
Schilling's Laws for Perfect Start(up)s
This is the main reason I wanted to join YC, to limit lawyer expenses.
i guess it doesnt update my session that i voted and can still vote the normal way
Weird question. How much value is he going to bring in? How critical this guy is for your organization?

Do you expect us to decide for you? :-) Okey. Give him 43.75% and a written guarantee of a personal parking spot (a-la Mr. Lumberg in "Office Space") when you become next google :)
Thanks for that link, yubrew.

You're right - I know dealing with this guy is a bad idea and I'm not going to do it. What I'm really trying to figure out here is what my options are.
The importance of having your own inhouse technical team
i think most of the business fogeys don't understand the importance of having your own in house technical team. these fogeys actually think outsourcing development to offshore teams is the best way to go.

Right. Technology is the lifeblood of most successful web startups. So when was it good to outsource your lifeblood to a bunch of unknowns miles away?
I know that many people say this, and pg often cites it as a major benefit of YC. That's why I'm wondering.
Agreed. Many of the bad things she mentioned are things I consider positive things (privacy settings, non-customizable look). The article almost goes back and forth between describing things myspace has that facebook doesn't, and things that are easy to ask for but hard to do. Neither of these categories justifies hate, even if it is just an attention grabber.
Peanut, you've hit on something of importance, that I was mis-valuing before: do I need his money?

Upon further reflection, I probably don't need it. And when I reach the stage where I do need it, I probably want to get it from a real angel investor. Even if that didn't work out, I still have better places to get funding than this guy.

Guess I'll just have to pay a lawyer who specializes in tech startups.

This really clarifies the decision. Thanks!
Heres a quick and dirty .ico created from the icon:

http://www.paulbutler.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/yfavicon.ico
If you're based in California and do most of your business in CA, it might make sense incorporate in California instead of Delaware. CA has in the last few years made its laws more business friendly, and if you incorporate in CA you'll avoid having to pay certain taxes and fees twice (once for each state). There are a few other benefits DE has, but probably none of them will be useful at your early-mid stage company. Definitely worth looking in to.
If I wanted to be called by strangers from YC, I'd put my phone number in my profile.
You're not required to host your application with facebook

Infact, Facebook does not host any outside applications.

'Hosting' your application on the Facebook platform can be as simple sticking it in an iframe.
"Thanks to Paul Buchheit for writing the Javascript, and Trevor Blackwell for help integrating it."
I think the lack of a physical keyboard will have minimal impact on the success or failure of the iPhone.

Consider that millions of users adapted to the clunky text message interfaces of their cell phones. They aren't going to balk at a virtual keyboard, especially when the tradeoff is that you get a much larger screen for viewing video. A consumer that wouldn't buy the phone for lack of a physical keyboard probably isn't in the target market anyway.
The article managed to list most of the thigns I actually still like about Facebook.
As I recall from some other people who have compared such things del.icio.us tends to bring a steady stream of traffic compared to a one day torrent. Or at least that was the case for their sites.
I used ppmtowinicon to make the ourdoings.com favicon. No need to boot into Windows. Thanks to utilities like that plus WINE for IE testing, I haven't had to boot Windows since I got the XP web publishing wizard integration done.
FWIW, I've sold two LLCs (one to private buyers and one two a VC backed dotcom). Worked fine. Both had sub ~$500 in legal setup fees.

As you say, it's easy to move from LLC to C. Start it easy and quick (but do your trademark homework) and see if you can build a successful product. Statistically speaking, you probably can't, in which case you haven't wasted dollars on lawyers.

If you start to feel like your product is taking off (or has potential to), get off your butt and invest in some real legal help to get your ducks in a row.

Of course, if YC will help you do it right out of the gates-- that's dandy.
Hey Reelman,
I'm the TrackSuit CEO, the first company I started is EmployeeInsider, an online job rating forum for all industries. I'll write more about it later (tomorrow?). I've since run several businesses. I do SEO contracting and most recently I've done marketing through one of my companies for ridester.com
Thanks for the comment!
Who Has the Best Readers On the Internet?
Hey Donna,
Thank you for the submission!
"The problem is that just as business types are bad at evaluating hackers, hackers are bad at evaluating business types."

That's a very good point. Perhaps someone familiar with the subject should try writing "Great Business Types" and "The Suit Paradox".
Well, in that case you might want to give the existing work a certain value (say 30%), and split the rest evenly.
i think if yc startups are being set up by lawyers vs. incorp service than you might consider going that route.
There are a ton of variables involved for each situation, but if your going for the angel to VC path, paying for a lawyer with experience in web/tech startup financing is a good idea.

Many top law firms will defer the fees, and it looks good to an investor when you have decent lawyer backing you up.
The core of your business should be in-house. If the technology sits at the core of your business -- as it does for most web companies -- then outsourcing it is foolish. If your business is actually something else, like plumbing, and the tech just supports it, then you may as well outsource it; it's a decision for a cost-benefit analysis.
A startup every student should know about&#8230;
My experience indicates that adsense is less effective than traditional search-results google advertising.

I'm confused by the phrase "having issues with their money "wasted" (I'm quoting) on AdSense placement (ads showing up on other people's websites, where people are not clicking on them as much or not at all)".

You pay for the click (or VERY little for views-- CPM). What people SHOULD be concerned about is the higher rate of click fraud on adsense ads (publishers have a vested interest in getting people to click on their ads). They should also be concerned about the gray area of "ad confusion" - designing an adsense site in such a way that the ads seem less like ads and more like normal site navigation.

I'd avoid the Adsense publishing network altogether.
Foobity - A Company, A Facebook App
"Foobity" just sounds.. Well.. Naughty.
I agree with you, but it would be interesting to find out more about the project...
Hrm...Foobity does sound kind of naughty. I'm agreeing and I'm one of the founders, hah! What would you like to know about the project (he said while avoiding developing it)?
Congrats, guys! Getting in the WSJ is a HUGE accomplishment, and you should be extremely proud.
Yes, but I'm not interested in visiting the profile, because as you say it's usually blank.

The person's website though would be something I would visit, and most people don't hide their websites on blogs.

EDIT: I should clarify: When a person writes a comment, it's the comment itself that would lead me to wonder what this person is all about. I'll click on his name. I'm not interested in a "profile", I'm expecting a website. The fact that I get the YC profile means I stop looking, and go back to reading the article. As such I never really figure out who the person is.
That assumes that your first company is the only one you'll ever do.
Click here to log yourself out of reddit (or "CSRF in 4 paragraphs")
Created? You sure you didn't hit "view image"? :-)
As I said, it is a q&d .ico created from the image. I didn't change anything, just cropped out a few pixels to make it 16x16 and saved it as an .ico file.
erm. referring to web startups here.

And yes. You heard me right. I've talked to a number of so called internet biz dev "pros" and they actually advocate outsourcing site development to offshore places and concentrate on marketing. I was like, WTF? Now i know why the successful web startups all originate from hackers. These internet biz dev "pros" just don't get it

The most uncomfortable thing is that my non-techie co-founder actually agrees with this thought. Maybe it's time for me to find another cofounder.

You can really tell the diff between an outsourced site and a non-outsourced site. An outsourced site will most likely be .aspx (India's fav), have a rigid design/structure. Eg. http://scriptovia.com

An in-house version usually has its own unique design/identity Eg. scribd.com
What position, equity, loan, or other did you give the investor in return. Are you going through all the legal red tap to make sure everything is by the book and how complicated has that process been to start taking is money. One thing that has kept us from accepting small investments is the legal tape surrounding additional bookkeeping.
There a stupid bug - after you vote, the arrow is hidden, but it will accept clicks :-) So you can continue to upvote many times, and the score text updates. When you refresh, the actual vote is restored.

Tested with Safari 419.3.
The amount of AJAX is indeed very little, actually zero :-)
Google: The state of our video ID tools
Sketching with a Sharpie - (37signals)
Don't we get karma for submissions anymore?