skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But now you have to ask yourself a few more questions:

- Channel Life: having a buttload of Joost channels that aren't well-maintained with new content is as annoying as amassing RSS feeds that are updated sporadically, sometimes month-to-month (which is why I don't like the idea of "channels," alas the folks at Joost do)

- Attention Deficit: Joost ultimately aims to replace television. Could you realistically picture yourself watching YouTube clips separated into content creator channels for more than 30 minutes?

- Community: One of Joost's best features is the interactive chat that brings content communities closer together. How does this happen with highly fragmented user content?

These are just some of the things that immediately come to mind. I'm not saying that a Joost P2P TV system doesn't make sense, it just requires a lot of consideration.
"Your Drop Box is a File Cabinet that Follows You Around Everywhere You Want to Go, Across Your Computers, or Across The Country."

Ladies & Gentlemen, the WORLD'S LIGHTEST FILE CABINET. Great for cross-country roadtrips! =)
It would have to have some notation for parse trees, and if that wasn't s-expressions, it would probably be something less convenient, not more.
Good idea. The most important thing YC provides is an effective social network. You're connected to piers going through the same process, so you have people that understand what you're going through. In addition, YC provides advise/access to people who have been where you're attempting to go and facilitates interactions with investors that would be difficult to arrange on your own. You probably couldn't offer the same networking opportunities, but if someone is having a hard time finding a cofounder, being Cambridge at MIT would probably help.
Boycott link bait.
Google Launches MyMaps-Kills Google Maps Eco System
I agree with all your points. That's why my offer doesn't really compete with YC. In fact, you have to have applied to YC and been turned down in order to be considered for this option.

I can't provide the peer-group support and advice that PG does. But, I can hopefully start you down the process (I'm involved with half a dozen local startups, not including my own, and have decent contacts on both the entrepreneurial side and the investment side of the community).
InfoTangle :: Information Design for the New Web
Wow this summer will be very interesting. I'd like to see the outcome of the Techstars.org, YC and onstartups. I'm sure we should get a good crop of startups.
The Truth about the Lone Startup Founder
Let them roll out Joost as planned, and build a following (assuming that Joost is interesting). Then, watch them release a patch, which enables Joost to optionally function as I described. It would come at marginal cost to Joost.

Some people will turn on the feature and experiment with it. Should somebody manage to put together an interesting channel, then it will spread throughout the system. For example, Joost could be the platform that drives Justin.tv.
Well, the fact that GDrive is not materialising makes this idea a great aquisition target. Then again Google might squash it like it did Kiko if/when it rolls out GDrive.
I don't think anyone is arguing that lone founder startups can NEVER succeed; the argument is lone founder startups have a lesser success rate, probably.

And in a game of numbers, it easy to see why YC would want to focus on multi-partner startups over single when there is no shortage of them.

-Zaid
nope. informally came up with and tossed around 6 or 7 ideas at the same time -- not so much coding as investigating/talking to potential customers and bouncing them off other friends and entrepreneurs. this was crucial -- ideas don't really fall out of the sky, they evolve.

there were several times where i'd get really excited about one idea -- like pacing in my living room at 5:30am excited -- and then 5 days later find out (via a different set of search terms or something) there were 3 other people doing the same thing, with a head start and more money.

ultimately they say scratch your own itch -- this was a problem (syncing a 3gb file across several computers efficiently) i routinely had working on a prior company i had started and i was frustrated that no one had solved it well, and it turned out to be more promising than my original company :)
Of his reasons, 1 and 2 are mistaken. If a startup with a single founder looks especially promising, we don't simply reject them; we get them to find one.
And we have no bias toward consumer apps. Two of the most successful startups we've funded (neither is launched yet) are doing stuff for businesses. The reason we fund more consumer apps is simply that more apply.

BTW, we're soon going to announce a third plan B, which we hope will be a better alternative to this or Techstars: to work for a YC "alumni" company. While some (e.g. Loopt) are quite established, others are so new that you could be the first hire, which is very much like being a founder.
I don't know if it's sexy but I like buxfer. I have this notion that it's a shortened version of "more bucks fer you"
GigaOM: Google MyMaps Smashes Mash-ups
I tried to be careful on point #1 and stated it as "leans heavily towards startups with 2 or more co-founders". I think this was a reasonably fair characterization, as I don't think you reject applicants purely on the fact that they are a sole founder.

Point taken on #2 (since I don't know what the applicant pool looks like, it was easy to guess that you have a bias towards consumer internet based on past selections).

I think it rocks that you're going to make another path available for folks to join existing YC alumni. This is a great idea. Yet one more reason for folks to consider applying to YC in the first place (i.e. it can be a channel to find more great people for the company).

I'm continually impressed.
Ignore please... thanks
Who does graphic design for YC companies?
If you really need to be told a plan B you shouldn't start a startup.

Plan B is just start building something and stop worrying about getting other people's approval! If you make something cool, then you will be able to find other founders, money ... etc.
I'm not trying to downplay the importance of co-founders so much as try to show people what they need to be looking for in cofounders as well as what they need themselves. YC has every right to want multiple founders, but for someone who doesn't get in, or doesn't apply, this information could help them know where to focus their time.
I've noticed that a number of the recent YC companies have some pretty slick web 2.0-style graphic design (loopt, Wufoo, i'm in like with you, and Scribd, just to name a few).

I'm guessing folks aren't doing the design themselves? If not who is?
Just so everyone is aware, S3 guarantees only 4 nines of relability (99.99% uptime), not 5 nines.

5 nines means the service is down, on average, 5 minutes out of a year.

4 nines would be almost an hour.

That's still pretty damn good.
news.com.com
Understanding the stages of 2.0 Startup Hype
The intellectual feeling I get here is something I really miss from Reddit's early days. Granted, YC News doesn't cover everything I care about, but like startupguy said, the signal to noise ratio is amazing. I just dropped Reddit from my bookmarks bar because I only have so much time and the S/R ratio is falling for me.
It was $10,000. Julian was the model for YC. He incorporated us, gave us $10k, and taught us how to raise more. We know that's enough, because it was for us.
Technorati Says Japanese Is the Language of Blogosphere
That's a GREAT question!
I didn't see that in the FAQ - I assumed 4/10 meant 4/10. What I'm curious about is if everybody gets notified all at once or as they make the decision about a particular application.
Could you give an example that's more powerful? From the 60-second intro you linked to, these look no more powerful than C's macros.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_preprocessor#Macro_definition_and_expansion
Yeah, but saying you have "unlimited" internet access, and then saying you can ONLY use it for email and browsing the web kinda sucks. And that the only way you can use more than 5gb/month is if you're doing something illegal is worse.

But read between the lines: Carriers like Verizon still make their money in high-margin voice calls and text messaging fees. They would lose that revenue if you could use IM and Skype over their data network. Same for streaming video: Verizon really just doesn't want you using a competitor's IPTV product instead of their own.

They think they deserve a cut of the revenue for content sent over their network, even though all they're doing is giving you Internet access. This is what Net Neutrality is all about.
User Interface Design for Programmers
That's definitely true in terms of defmacro and syntax-case. However, I do think with some effort the scripting-language community could come up with something almost as powerful as syntax-rules from R5RS, thus catching up to where the Scheme community was in 1991. With syntax-rules the person writing the macro does not have to explicitly deal with the parse tree.
do you think that a virtual YC environment could be designed to provide the same rich experience that you get in person? or is it simply impossible? just a point of curiosity on my part.
1. re: the first part, many people want something plug and play. and even if they were plug and play, the problem is that the user experience (on windows at least) with online drives generally sucks, and you don't have disconnected access.

windows for sure doesn't hide latency well (CIFS is bad, webdav etc. are worse), and most apps are written as if the disk was local, and assume, for example, accessing a file only takes a few ms. if the server is 80ms away, and you do 100 accesses (e.g. the open file common dialog listing a directory and poking files for various attributes or icons) serially, suddenly your UI locks up for _seconds_ (joel spolsky summarizes this well in his article on leaky abstractions.) ditto saving any file; you change one character in your 20mb word file and hit save, and your upstream-capped 40k/sec comcast connection is hosed for 8 minutes. sure for docs of a few hundred k it's fine, but doing work on large docs on an online drive feels like walking around with cinder blocks tied to your feet. anyway, the point of that rant was that dropbox uses a _local_ folder with efficient sync in the background, which is an important difference :)

2. true, if you're both not at your computer and on another computer without net access, this won't replace a usb drive :) but the case i'm worried about is being, for example, on a plane, and dropbox will let you get to the most recent version of your docs at the time you were last connected, and will sync everything up when you get back online (without you having to copy anything or really do anything.)

3. there are some unannounced viral parts i didn't get to show in there :) it'll be a freemium model. up to x gb free, tiered plans above that.
I wouldn't put Scribd on that list personally. But from what I hear they're working on bettering what they have. Plus with all that traffic I doubt they'd be too worried.

Wufoo as far as I know was designed by one of their team members who came from a design/usability background. They started a magazine called ParticleTree(http://particletree.com/) before launching Wufoo.

-Zaid
This falls into the category of "someone should have told them..." Run by some new arrivals to the US, I think. Somebody, their lawyer, or accountant... somebody should have told them.

I was cruising around an outdoor mall in Bellevue WA. There was a restaurant that... um... caught my eye. Looking in the window, I saw it was a perfectly ordinary BBQ place - bright lights, lots of people just having lunch, families, etc.

Restaurant's name? The Flaming Porker.
Great graphs about blog trends from Technorati
Ar the YC founders having this kind of experience? This sounds like a traumatic experience to me, but pg claims a 100% satisfaction rate.
A startup has a lot in common with a garage band making pop songs. I.e.:

"A couple of young, talented people, working out of their garage, create a product in the hope that a big company will buy their effort, and make them a lot of money."

Make Something People Want is not fun. The alternative is to go Indy. I'm considering moving to a low-cost country, living a student life, and working on my own projects for a while. If I happen to make Something I Can Make Money From, great. But that's not the point. I'll get to pursue my own ideas, 100% of the time. I'll see just how far I can go.
names are boring without witty promise enabling tag lines...

Fondle, We Make it Simple

oh oh.. current names.. lame.. my bad..
But, of course, you don't have to have code files full of parens in order to have s-expressions. Alternative syntaxes have never taken hold in the Lisp world, which may mean they just offer nothing to an experienced Lisp hacker, but they're certainly not impossible.

You can have user-definable infix operators; Haskell has them and uses them to good effect. (The way Haskell does it, you can't have identifiers composed of both letters and operator characters, which Lisp people like to do, but I think we can safely treat that as a matter of taste.) You pick a symbol, say ~, and assign it a precedence and left- or right-associativity:

infixr 3 ~

infixl 7 .!.

Now (x ~ y .!. z) is parsed as ((~) x ((.!.) y z)), where (~) is the Haskell way of making the ~ operator as a prefix function. Haskell also lets you use a prefix function as an infix operator, by putting backquotes around it.

If you want to apply this in Lisp, there is the issue that (foo) means something else than foo; I would like to allow (foo x + bar y) to mean ((+) (foo x) (bar y)), but I wouldn't want (x + y) to mean ((+) (x) (y)). My solution would be that a single value is parsed as just a value, but multiple values next to each other is a function call: (foo x + y) is ((+) (foo x) y), to call y without parameters you have to write (foo x + (y)).

This leaves you with the parantheses for control structures and the like. If you like layout-based languages, you can adopt the rule that "expression + colon + newline + indented expression 1 + indented expression 2 + ..." is parsed as "expression (indented expression 1) (indented expression 2) ...".

Some examples of code from On Lisp formatted like this:

http://himalia.it.jyu.fi/~benja/2007/layoutedlisp.txt

Of course, it still looks like Lisp, with less parens.
Though the number of blogs is still growing, the volume of blog posts may have peaked in mid 2006. Hard to say for sure; maybe just a temporary plateau; but definitely not clear upward growth.
I dont know if there are more than 2 plans. Its either YC or go alone. Reason for sticking with YC is free access to paul graham :D and his suggestions. I think this is something priceless and if at all we are out of YC, I hope i have a face to face meet up with PG and convince/beg to be our mentor :) Just like George Bush quoted "You are either with us or against us", i would go ahead and quote, its either YC or alone :)
Now, You CAN be in Two Places at the Same Time!
Wufoo and Likewithyou are doing it themselves. They have design backgrounds. Loopt is now a big co and presumably paid a good design firm. I think Scribd has an outside designer too.
The author has been bang on target. Its quite possible to be one man army and still pull off with a great company but it would take time and this lone guy must work 3 to 5 people's work. Second thing is, having more people who match the same level of thinking helps hammering out loop holes and building better products.
How to get the attention of a Venture Capitalist (dupe)
Google Launches MyMaps - Platial Gets Screwed
Yahoo RealEstate Launches Foreclosure Resource Center With RealityTrac
My friend keeps telling me that my company has a name that is too hard to spell. "www.campusassassins.com" What you think?
Haliburtun
Example list of the info a VC would request during due diligence
It's hopping around fulfilling requests like this that's not on the radar when I'm underestimating how much work a startup's really going to be.
Here are a few resources for spiffing up your "artist" and "seller" hats:

=== The Artist ===

. The Non-Designer's Design Book, by Robin Williams. This short, easy read details four essential design principles that will help you consciously communicate better visually. It's also available on O'Reilly's safari service.

. Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design. This book will help you build your design vocabulary and better understand concepts in design that you likely haven't thought of. It will help you describe the ways in which this page - http://www.sandstromdesign.com/nav.html - sucks (it lacks external consistency and it contains interference effects, to begin with). The book has a great format, describing a topic on one page with visual examples on the following page. The descriptions are short of enough that you can read them in about 4 minutes.

. http://www.hallwaytesting.com - this is actually my own site. You can post your site for usability feedback and give usability feedback. Live usability tests allow you to get more details, but the users on my site also give valuable feedback, and it doesn't cost you any money or nearly as much time. I try to give feedback for as many sites as possible and am usually pretty thorough about it. Users have told me that the site has helped them a lot.

=== The Seller ===

. http://www.marketingexperiments.com . This site is absolutely the best web development resource I've found, ever. It contains articles on developing a unique value proposition, doing competitive analysis on the Internet, and of course actually marketing your site using PPC, SEO, and other online marketing techniques. Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned from this site is that online marketing is online testing.

. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. For a long time I didn't want to read this book because I thought doing so would make me a sleaze ball. Instead it's made me a more effective communicator. When you think about it, honing our skills in most areas involves learning how to communicate with other humans better. As The Tech Wizard it's essential that you communicate the purpose of your code. As The Artist it's essential you communicate the purpose of a site and each of its elements. As The Seller you must know how to communicate value. Dale Carnegie's book will show you how to effectively communicate value.
The amount of spam they've been killing has actually been substantial for the past week. (Mostly the same couple spammers; I don't know why they haven't banned their IPs yet). I've been keeping showdead turned on because I'm curious about seeing how the situation evolves, but once spam reaches about double its current volume I'm going to turn it off because it'll be too annoying.

Edit: Maybe they've banned them now; the new queue is currently clean.
Re: "rebooting the server gives you a clean state"

That's not quite true: the HD contents survive crashes and reboots. Only if you release the node (or lose it otherwise -- it's not guaranteed to stay with you), the HD contents are lost.

I suspect lots of startups are finding it "stable enough", and the backup/redundancy planning needed manageable.
Finally someone is going to try to put the late-night "get all the information you need to buy a forclosure home" informercials out of business.
I really don't think most of these mashups INHERENTLY will die. They might take a huge beating in how fast they grow but I think if the current mashups continue to focus on their CURRENT userbase's needs, they can turn it into a modestly profitable venture. Not everything has to return a fortune financially:)

I do pity the startups that raised millions and were based off of google maps. It never made sense to me but hopefully they know something I don't about their long-term strategy.

-Zaid
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=9161

Oops.
You links at the bottom of the page like FAQ etc is not working. I wonder if its because you are a lone founder... Jokes, I am a lone founder too.
Hahah, exactly! I just decided to start using my own product even though it's not completely finished. :)
These are the precise questions that my startup, Knowitall.tv, is trying to answer. What will advertising look like as video programming and advertising dollars shift to the web? Where are those advertising dollars going to go, who will decide on the content these dollars will fund, and who will provide this content?

I think the most important thing Garfield notes in this article is the huge shift in power has occurred with the advent of dvr and web video. People don't have to sit through flashy, in-your-face ads that shout 'buy me!.' These ads can be fast-forwarded or deleted. On the web, the attention span of the viewer is drastically reduced by the sheer volume and choice of content. Why would I watch an ad when I don't have to on this site over here? The audience is no longer captive. The student has become the teacher. We are in charge.

Advertising and networks are not doomed in any sense. However, traditional, 'flashy' ads will have to be replaced by more informative, interactive, gentle, pull advertising content. Think product placement, contests, video games, informational videos... Ad content will also be interactive-the best way to extend the short-attention span of the average web user. Just because networks are reeling in costs does in no way mean that they are 'over.'

Yes, traditional purveyors of advertising and large networks should be concerned, but only if they do not adapt to this huge shift in power. These networks and ad companies became successful because of innovation and I am sure they will temper the storm. However, who should be taking close note of this market shift is ambitious independent producers and content providers. There is a huge gap in the market for a few companies to sneak in and make an absolute killing.

To summarize: Because the viewer is in charge, ads in the future will inform rather than entertain, engage rather than impress, so really, the only question to answer is, what do the end users want to know and from whom?
I believe local expertise and endorsement to be the untapped goldmine of this 'new' advertising.
Even if you are the perfect seller, artist, and coder, you will still only have one opinion on everything. You need someone to be right when you are wrong, and wrong when you are right.
I wish the Reddits had been doing this. We ran into some bizarre impeachment behavior a few weeks ago. I think they're proud of running an open and market-driven site, but sometimes that can go wrong. Shirky's essay at http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html sort of describes this.
Interesting post!

Obviously, a person can theoretically have all of the skills to pull off a startup alone (though I can count the number of people I know who are good coders AND good UI designers on one hand).

The big plus of a co-founder (IMHO) or two is motivation and energy.

Oh, and intelligence. Two good brains are generally more than twice as smart as one. :-)
I've never understood why this is such a popular question.

Remember this remark from The Matrix? "After a while you don't even see the code. All you see is blonde, redhead..." Well, after a while you don't even see the parens. All you see is closure, continuation...

Seriously, just start reading On Lisp and by the time you're half-way through it you'll be at this point.
This is the main reason you have an API. See what people do with your stuff and then do it better!