skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this is a valid argument. When startup employees lose their jobs it's usually because the entire company has gone under. Motorola may be doing massive layoffs, but they're still around and they still have plenty of employees. If you're good enough to be right for a startup, and your current BigCo isn't so bureaucratic that they do their layoffs strictly by seniority, then if half the company gets laid off, you stand a pretty good chance of being in the other half.

What's really important is just to have enough faith in your own abilities that you don't consider losing your job to be a big deal. Of course, you should still either go in with enough savings to cover living expenses for a month or two, or join a company that has enough money in the bank that you can acquire those savings before their money runs out.
Startup search exposes the people behind web startups
Kathy Sierra expanded on this once:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/12/dont_make_the_d.html

By the way, the Spore team at EA are running into this issue of not tempering expectations:

http://reddit.com/info/1p4pt/comments/c1p5mo
As a banker, I asked each entry-level candidate to tell me about something that they did that was hard. Basically, I want to know how they will perform when it's gut-check time. The real world will provide occasions where their character will be tested.

One positive about this method is that I got to hear some interesting stories, whether it was the kid that started his own commercial hookah bar in college or the one that expelled a friend as a member of his college honor council. It was easy to tell which candidates had the right stuff and which did not.

Intelligence is important, but the kid that was voted most likely to succeed in my high school was not near the most intelligent. And for what it's worth, I think the voting was accurate.
The best thing about paste is that you can also eat it when you've been working on your app for awhile.
Web 2.0 Framework diagrams
Could the difference in evaluation result from the different background of the founders? I don't know anything about Multiverse, but apparently the HPiHi people already have a background of founding very successful companies.
Slacker Gets $40 Million for Growth
No, just focus on the users, solve real problems, have a working business model, be profitable ASAP, avoid to get VC funds.
RFC: Rejected YC concept built as an integrated Facebook app
First off I apologize because you need to be on Facebook to use this.

Our YC app was rejected and my founder stayed at his job and I decided to go on ahead and see if I could make our idea work. The gist of what we submitted to YC was a platform where you could review anything like books, movies, cars, whatever. You could take these reviews and embed them into myspace, your blog, or just directly build off your profile on the site. The business model was to find affiliates, like amazon for books, and build revenues from there. I'd hazard a guess and say the business model was what sunk us more than anything else. Great for a lifestyle business but not really for growing something huge.

When Facebook announced that it was opening its platform up to integrated webapps I jumped on the chance. Building on top of Facebook limits my long term growth potential but gives the platform provides a lot. I really believe in what Facebook is doing here. In the future all apps will be social and building a community is really hard. Facebook solves this problem for you. There are downsides but I think in my case it is a win. If this really takes off it will take some work, but not be impossible, to spin it out into the original idea and have the facebook aspect just be a widget.

I've been working on it for a little over a week solid. There's a lot missing from what I'd like to have as a finished product, but I got the core done and decided I should put it out there and iterate on feedback. It's written in Django and uses python bindings for both the facebook and amazon APIs. I'd appreciate any advice or feedback, especially from this crowd. You can message me on facebook or email me directly at: jay at wardtek dot ca

There's more I'd like to write on this whole bit but I'll have to write a blog post later. Right now I'm just dead tired. I look forward to some interesting / useful feedback :)
Rethinking the Linux Distribution
'... What about 64bit? There is no Windows 64bit or OS X 64bit version either right now. As I said before it is not a question of 'recompiling' the source code, there is lots of generic non platform specific work which needs to be finished first. We will ship a 64bit version for Windows, OS X Leopard and GNU/Linux. It will happen. When? ...' ~ http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/10/flash-player-9-for-linux-beta-1.html

32 or 64?
Auctomatic changing its name?
It's only wasting time if the time would have otherwise been spent doing useful work. I also think there can be value in debating minor details. A lot of thinking goes on when you're forced to defend your decision and rational in debate form.
The link doesn't work. Did you change your API settings to make the app public?
Spyware Alert: Are Sites You Visit Spying On You?
My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns
Theres no reasons why you can't just start your company outside of the US. It may be a bit harder if you're not in the valley but you can always try.
This is kind of ironic...
Startups should probably wait until they are successful before saying "And YC rejected us". Saying it early doesn't really mean anything.
Microsoft Surface Computer Appeared in D: All Thing Digitals
Microsoft is not DEAD yet!!

This is the conclusion I come out with after I read the news about Microsoft in action again. If you read the news on the recent All Things Digital you will know what I mean.

I am not super fan of microsoft but I respect them as they are really working on new product to benefits people like you and me.

They have came out from the stiff competition of internet & pc world and go into new arena that again they become the leader now.

If you want to find out more about this, I have put up in my blog about the recent introduced of Surface Computer:
http://www.interneton9.com/2007/06/microsoft-surface-computer-appeared-in-d-all-thing-digitals/

There is no point to discuss who afraid who here now. We should go on to discuss how this products can bring a lot ore convenience to us in our daily life.

Steven Wong
Very interesting article. I had the same idea, but instead of completely eliminate ads for fans, I would sell the bandwidth at a high price or even with auction.

This ad bandiwdth has a high value for advertisers because of the occasional ad display, a campaing would have a higher visibility (no ad blindness effect). The fan's interests are well identified so that the ad can be focused. It will also make more sense for the fans and eventually be useful to them.

One can always trade member fee with add display, but one should keep the auction effect so that advertisers that pay a high fee still get through. The user could also increase its fee to make the ad barrier higher. This yields a competition.

I designed this business model for a startup using crowd sourcing, where fans contributing to the site would get back their fair share of ad revenue. They could use part of this revenue to increase the ad barrier. The idea was to create a vertuous circle that motivate users and advertisers to increase contribution.

I gave up because funding was too short and I was alone without much time to invest on it. And also because I wasn't sure it would work. So I'm glad to see the base idea is already practiced.

People should understand that flooding the web with ads is diluting its value. So one need ways to increase focus in the benefit of users and advertisers.
Check this video from the maker of Pylons to get a good overview of WSGI - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-872784530622495809
You couldn't be more wrong. Such tests do exist, (in fact, as you say, the SAT test has a strong correlation with intelligence) but US corporations have been forbidden to use such tests since the 'Griggs vs. Duke Power' case of 1971. So instead, people doing hiring let college admissions departments do their intelligence testing. If you got into Harvard, that probably says something about your IQ. Of course, this is a much worse situation, and has a lot to do with our current overemphasis on educational credentials, and skyrocketing tuition costs.

It's not that companies don't care about IQ, it's that they are disallowed from using it explicitly.
It is you who does not understand statistics. If the 'top people' is a population with a higher than average IQ, then that is probably a useful thing to measure when trying to predict if someone is going to be a top person, even if not all high IQ people are top people and not all top people have high IQ. See Bayes.

Also, if you were coming to this situation with no prior knowledge that IQ means intelligence (that is, imagine that you didn't know what the term IQ means) then you could suspect that its correlation with 'top people' might not be causative. The trouble is, you live and work in the real world, and so have seen smart and not-so-smart people at work. So you have strong reason to suspect that the arrow of causality points from IQ, not towards it.

Intelligence is not the only thing, but it's important and it can be measured.
That's not what he's saying. He said self motivation. So if left to their own devices they'd rather learn more than stick to one task and produce something.

Smart, productive people are what you want when they are being motivated, possibly by others, e.g. boss or peer pressure. I don't care how productive they are if they're not smart and not working in a smart manner.
Why is Google spamming the web? (If you advertise on Google, this is a must read)
Well crap ;) That'll teach me for writing stuff when I'm too tired to double check. I have no idea where I got that URL from....

http://apps.facebook.com/apps/application.php?api_key=3724b1a0743578308ce28e934c600377
We changed the web?

Its all about...

Me.

Arrogant - Having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self importance...

yawn....
Optimal Sale is waaaay too straightforward of a name for a YC funded company. Sorry.
The Next Web Conference coverage from R/WWeb
See the reddit discussion of this same article-- commenters point out that this is due to TOS violations, i.e. ripping the ad content out of the google iframe and putting it statically on the page. So google can't tell that it's indexing adwords content.

http://reddit.com/info/1vczh/comments

http://reddit.com/info/1vczh/comments/c1vezw
The Long Tail... Of Porn
I think google's indexing of ad content is a minor problem relative to the fact that it is an accessory to millions upon millions upon millions of spam sites.

But really, c'mon. I know, I know, I know, everybody loves them and they can never do wrong, but...a multi-billion dollar corporation whose business model is dependent upon people accidentally clicking links?
My favorites: http://paulgraham.com/love.html
http://paulgraham.com/essay.html
"SmugLispWeenies"
don't worry, I'm sure they'll take out a vowel or something, like optimalsal or optimalsle
we thought about it but we're sticking with auctomatic.
Andrew Chen: Stop asking "Does the world need another social network?"
Not exactly. It tells us what tribe the applicants are, but we don't accept or reject based just on tribe.
All I'll say is this - Auctomatic is a really bad name. It's a name that really does not scale. Maybe in English it's half way passable, but try that name in any other language. First of all, it makes no sense (you lose the "auction"-"automatic" link), and you are using letters that are terrible to spell. "Au"? Impossible. "c" - what type of c? The combination of "Au" and "c" is very unusual in many tongues and will lead to a host of misspellings.

Additionally, it's too near to automatic. People slur and others mishear.

Not only that, but it's just a terrible brand name. It's not short or easy to remember, and does not jump out. Maybe it's trendy right now to use such names, but remember, it's trendy only within your bubble. Outside, normal people remember names like salesforce or intel.

You are pre-launch. You can change your name with little consequence. But no, all the cool kids have wierd names, so we gotta have a wierd name too.

You just wait. One fine day when you need to expand, everyone will realise - Maximus actually had a good point.
An incredible startup to find all support information for any Consumer Product
Actually, hiring assessments do exist and are legal to use. Creating hiring assessments is part of the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology (I believe it's called "Work Psychology" in the UK).

For example, one I/O Psychologist I know has a consulting business, among other things, administering an assessment called the Totalview 2000 to potential hirees for many organizations. It basically works by first testing the personality and several aptitudes of existing top performers for a specific job at an organization to create a benchmark for top-performers, and then comparing the scores of applicants against the benchmark. Unfortunately, as such it is very specific (e.g.: the benchmarks for the same position at two different offices of the same engineering firm differ slightly because said offices take different clients), and only works well if you already have several identified top performers.
The article seems to be written by a non-native English speaker - full of errors. I like the idea for the service though, but they didn't even have an entry for my laptop (Dell Inspiron 9400) but served up a lot of adds revolving around it.
Danielha NPV, IRR are good measures too, but I think 90% of investors still use ROE, ROI, ROA etc.
What makes a startup successful?
Employees? You want people who do as they're told and accept bureaucracy.

Essentially the opposite of a founder.
I went to a functional programming group meeting and found that the people there used the term hacker with disdain. From the context it seemed like they used it to refer to programmers who don't have graduate degrees.
That's fair enough -- if a language doesn't fit your aesthetic, it's quite a valid reason to use something else.
Free and Open Source.... Porn?
_have to be politically disadvantaged_

I'm going to make a wild guess and say that, pound for pound, homosexuals have political influence twice as great as heterosexuals, and, in their core issues, 100x as great.
Great points. And back forward!

We did hear it last year; I reported it several times at Valleywag.

Facebook has smaller profits, but the point of the small staff is that their personnel costs are also 100 times smaller than Google's. And yes, they could be making more money, great!

I haven't seen the falloff numbers either, so we both concede that point. Is MySpace's user base actually growing more than Facebook's? Anyway, like you said, Facebook's revenue could grow without growing the userbase.

Facebook is for fun, but more and more it's social in a useful way. That's why my 37-year-old media-minimogul boss is hooking up with VCs, bankers, and other rather influential people (ones not connected to Web 2.0!) on the site.

Side note: Facebook encourages users to track the activities through which they mediate relationships. They can share photos of their real-life interactions, join groups, etc; LinkedIn only has a limited version of this. So I can learn a lot more about my contact's connection to someone I want to meet through Facebook than through LinkedIn. "Anyone dumb enough to mix business with pleasure" is a lot of people. Hell, even Congress works that way, sadly.

I'm confident Facebook can compete in those other countries the way it does in the US: by being more "legit" and "safe" than Bebo, a MySpace-like group with little basis in real-world groups, and Orkut, heavily criticized in Brazil as a pedophile's haven thanks to Google's protection of "user privacy."

Safer being acquired? Ha, yeah, I'd feel safe with Yahoo's execs overseeing me, what with CEO Terry Semel barely keeping his job and two of the top three positions vacant. Facebook doesn't want to commit itself to Yahoo's disappointing ad system (the new Panama wasn't up to snuff); if he joined them it'd be after the company got over its midlife crisis.

It's in Facebook's best interests to mature on its own and partner with the big boys. The company's on a healthier trajectory than Yahoo and Microsoft (and Amazon and eBay, for what that counts), so it should stay under its own roof and play off their strengths without taking on their burdens.
max - i agree with everything you say, which is why we were considering it. turns out though it was too late to change our name for the ebay Live gig so we're sticking with it. OptimalSale may end up being a product name of something we launch.
Entrepreneur looking for CTO - Recruiting 2.0
Like a couple of shots inside a thermal exhaust port.
_They say they have an answer to the new competition: quality_

Bigger, faker, titties.

"We use different locations, rooms and couches."

LOL: He means "Different cooches"

"Joseph, Fishbein, Kaplan, and Coffman"

Sounds like a law firm.
Breaking: Loopt competitor Amp'd files for chapter 11
Article to be filed under sarcasm. ;)

With Google's beta of analytics looking more and more bubbly it's not too hard to fuzz the lines and see a more complete picture with integration. If they could speed the process by aquiring Clicky's instant gratification it'd be a dangerous total package.
The guy is seeing from one perspective but the reality is those who have needs of security probably shouldn't be at a startup. ie: kids, tuitions, and SOs. Pick one, but I don't think it's safe for a person to get all three and step on board the startup instability train.

Yes, you may find kindred spirits.

Yes, you may find yourself back in the job search doldrums--how long does it take before you go back to the banks (insert your locales stable tech-pool) to put food on the table.

Startups rock, but they not be feasibly rockable for everyone. ;D You do what you need to, and that can only be done by the do-er.
Posted on the site, and have further thoughts.

"Work hard for a year, save enough, be diligent, and you too can fund your own startup.", was the basic summation of the article in the end.

The tools I'm working on require partnerships with different service carriers which can run as much as 10k a month, then you have contractors, lawyers, designers to pay. You'd have to have one helluva job to pay for all that. My partner and I have been using our salaries, equity lines, savings, for a year and it's not enough.

Playing the slow-goer, almost like a casual gamer, won't always work. In a years time maybe you'll get married. Maybe you'll have a kid. Maybe you'll get fired. Maybe you'll want to go live on an island and harvest coconuts. Not to mention the market might be radically different by the time you even launch.

If you have an idea, and you want to see it birthed, and you know what it will take, and you can write a plan that shows it--because you did the hard work to see it through--then birth that bad boy.

Term sheets aren't all horrible. Don't ask for the moon, be realistic, get what you need and make sure you don't have to go get more. Don't get an office, be frugal, hire the best, negotiate well, partner with those who are assets and share the love.

This isn't rocket science but it does take careful thought and solid reasons. Do your homework and make the right decision for you and your product.

-a
Eyeballs versus dollars: What should startups focus on?
UI Guidelines for "Live Software"
Google Launches a Directions API
Startup tips from Steve Poland
Digg Following Reddit (Trainable Filter)
"Rose said that context was also an issue for Digg; stories are being buried under the weight of noise making it more and more difficult for users to seek out and find niche stories. Digg is developing a smart suggestion system that will consider the type of stories a user has dugg previously then suggest similar stories based on that history."
Blog title makes it sound like you're yelling at yourself in third person. :-)
Well, I've become a fan of DENIM; lets you create clickable site mock-ups that no one (I think) would mistake for the real thing.

http://dub.washington.edu/projects/denim/
No more breaking than any other news. Especially once this hits the front page in a day.
From the site: "About Startup Search - Startup Search tracks the web technology ecosystem commonly referenced as "Web 2.0." We collect facts and figures about new web products, startup companies, key startup employees, and the funding dollars powering their growth."

I see no mention of "high growth startups". I could be wrong though, and if I am I would appreciate it if someone would provide the cite. :P
Perl, really? Just out of curiousity, what were your reasons? The close ties to shell scripting?
Any technical folk here looking for a startup?
To be fair, in the middle of the post Udi does mention that there are capital-intensive businesses that do require funding. His main point is in regards to building web applications and web businesses.

For many new companies funding is essential. If you want to build a new type of electric car, then you need a ton of money for manufacturing and R&D. If you want to open a restaurant, then you need money for rent, food, waiters and a chef. If you want to build a video sharing website then youll probably need some money because of bandwidth and storage concerns. If youre doing something like this, then funding is a necessary evil.
I believe we are in a bubble. Though not for the reasons he suggests. I am still trying to think through whether it is valid to think so.
eBay Live?
YouTube for fun, Google for work
Linux and the Masses -- what will it take to get them there?
Heh, I was there first: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2028
Silicon Valley gets rave reviews because it's less boring than all the other office parks. It does have good food, and a lot of interesting people, and techie events, etc. But if you're looking for nightlife and actual local culture (in the non-tech sense), don't move to silicon valley. The impression I get is that Silicon Valley is a great place to live if you're a geek who is married and has kids.
where we launch - June 14th, Boston Convention Center. eBay's annual gig.
OptimalSale is an awful name, really awful. It sounds like the title of a windshield-wiper-delivered coupon brochure.
Did anyone else see the startup revenue and expense chart?
I think there was a blog post bookmarked here a few days ago by someone that had a chart for a startup's expense and revenue chart over a 3-4 year period showing its ramp up in revenue and the growth of the company. Did anyone save it? Need it urgently. Thanks
stick with this name. Auctopus. Alright! Where's my 5% share of the company now?
Standalone Open Source Software Blossoms
In defense of Twitter
Gates reveals where 'Milan' is headed
The Ignorance of Crowds (Open Source Model)
Also, In India Internet companies/dot-coms are open to 100% Foreign Direct Investment and control. So if you start a company in India a VC or some other company can easily buy all of your stake. This could be true for other countries so check around...
Chinese activists turn to cellphones
'It's a wi-fi network - and it's an ad'
86 Mac Plus Vs. 07 AMD DualCore. You Won't Believe Who Wins
Will YCombinator invest in a Non-US startup
Folks,
There are many threads running on immigration laws and visa issues, and being someone who wishes to apply for the next round of YC school this leaves me a bit uncertain. So here is my question, what if the startup is good and Ycombinator likes it but the founders have visa trouble and aren't able to come to the US. What will happen then?

Also I am from India and in India companies of foreign origin are allowed to own 100% in an Internet startup, will Ycombinator consider letting us run our company out of India if we cant manage the visas?
Any clarification will help immensely. Thanks