skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You've mentioned your boss in a few posts and it sounds like he's a selfish prick, who doesn't genuinely care about what's good for you."

I actually don't think that - I think he's generally a decent guy who cares about his employees, but cares about his company more. He's even said something to that effect: part of his advice to me was to make sure I can setup a corporate structure that'll survive the departure of founders or key employees, because things do go wrong, and the company is his dream. Perhaps there's a lesson in there: don't let your identity get so wrapped-up in your company that it becomes only your company, one where other people don't feel like they have a chance to make a difference in it. Come to think of it, I've heard similar things from other (failed) entrepreneurs.

You're right though: I guess I just need to go with my gut. Eh, I'm young, I've got plenty of time for failures before success.
Why Feedburner is trouble
I'm curious - how does this compare with the buyout agreement detailed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192. Do you need to have both vesting and buyout provisions, or is vesting preferential to buyouts, or do you not need vesting with a sane buyout policy?
Excellent point. On a related note how does one legally manage vesting in the case of a merger between two startups? I'm considering a merger with another founder. My startup has been around for a little longer. Any thoughts?
MySpace Blocks the Letter "i"
Why didn't he say, "50 Reasons Why More People Aren't Using Your Website Because" instead? I see a lot of unnecessary "Because"'s
This is one of the great classics of computing, along with Goldberg's "What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic" -- just like Goldberg, Schneier takes things which people in the field understood implicitly for years, and puts them into a concrete form understandable not just to specialists but also to anyone familiar with computing.
Anyone have thoughts on the viability of a firefox os?
It's not a new idea. Why not roll a linux distro that boots directly into firefox and then start hacking ff to add on any missing os functionality and ensure the entire experience is smooth? There are plenty of people that don't use much more than their web browser and with Google Docs that number is only going to grow.

Anyone know of someone already working on this?
Top ten reasons to go to Startup Weekend
Sure, Startup Weekend didn't crank out a working project in two days. The reasons are now very well understood.
Most "start ups" run by expats in Japan work this way due to visa issues.
DormItem: 50,000 listings (3,700 a week), how we got there, and where we're going
If cperciva is Paris Hilton with brains, I sure hope someone doesn't email me the video...
Would it be possible to "open-source" an operating agreement so that we can actually work these things into our own?
> The article suggests that it's probably better not to have that external validation, and definitely better not to take the money. Is that character-building, or foolhardy?

The article is wrong. Start-up failure is rarely due to lack of emotional investment, it is almost always due to lack of capital. It is better to start with the confidence, money, and connections of other people. The key is to educate yourself about startup finance issues so you don't screw yourself. Luckily there are sites like news.ycombinator and venture hacks which give you a pretty good idea of good and bad funding models.
Big mistake launching a startup: make users pay for beta
PG: Thinking of adding a search facility to news.yc?
It doesn't have to be something like pagerank, just a simple text match would work?
It has been requested a few times: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

I agree with you, I think it's something news.yc really needs.
"The best advice on partnership is: Don't. But if you must, here's what you need to know."
An interesting story for people considering taking on business partners, co-founders, etc.
The core reason for their failure seem to be lack of team spirit. The author clearly considers Ken as a less competent partner.
Kind of loses the punch when you butcher it -- it's "DOS isn't done till Lotus won't run".
Fully agree, users are providing the beta with their valuable time, offer an exchange as QA testers.
There's something called KioskCD (at kioskcd.com). I've never used it but it looks like what you're looking for.
I know optimism is nice and all, but what makes you think Facebook isn't going to crush you?
I don't know if it will be the next big language, but I strongly believe there is a space for JS on the server side (actually ECMAScript). Why should web developers deal with two sets of languages? (JS on the client and whatever else on the server)

I am a long-time Java and C++ developer. More recently I've been actively developing in Flex, and I'm impressed with ActionScript (which now is ECMAScript). I for one would love to use ECMAScript on the server as well (today I use Java EE 5).
(PS: I misread 'waitress' as home servant.)
Looking for feedback on Facebook verson of Study Stickies (hopefully, it's easier to use now!)
YC News Advice Needed: Logo redesigned
Based on previous YC comments and others, we've redesigned the logo and would appreciate your thoughts on it, good or bad. :)
Based on past feedback from YC news and others, we've redesigned the logo and would really appreciate your feedback good or bad :)

Previous discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34741
I think vesting is a good idea for the founders (it's in their best interest), but I think if you're asking for someone to commit to such a long time period (ie 4-5 years), then it better be really good equity. Even better than if it were just offered "up front." There are also opportunity costs to consider, so your early employees or co-founders could be off starting their own companies with a lot more equity. So it's probably going to vary by each person, but in my experience, the vested equity has to be really good or I'm not interested.

I've been in startups where the vested equity was really low, and I left (I was employee #1). I've also talked with numerous people who thought about joining the same startup, and refused due to a number of reasons, but low equity was mentioned as one of the first reasons.
And workarounds have been suggested a few times:

http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/
http://ycsearch.com/
Any kind of search would be great.
Joe Kraus argues that if you are going to charge it's helpful to do it in beta to get feedback on how well you model is going to work.

#6 in http://www.brendonwilson.com/blog/2006/04/30/joe-kraus-confe...
Yes, this is a great idea. I don't use much more than a web browser, though Firefox 2.0 really gets bogged down with complex Flash and Javascript. The rendering engine of Firefox 3.0 is much better in that sense.

I've thought about this in great detail. The essential point is that a pure Firefox GUI allows someone uncomfortable with a normal computer to accomplish amazing tasks. Limiting the user interface allows them to accomplish more and there's almost nothing that can't be done from Firefox anyways. It's an idea YC likes, my team got an interview with this idea to get rejected for our lack of a prototype.

For now, I'm working on my biotech startup but once that's bringing in revenue I'm planning on coming back to this.

Email me, I'd love to talk about this more.
This is a great post. Something we were just considering in our own startup. Since we are just starting out it is easy for us to just brush it aside with our optimism, but really anything can happen, so after reading this post I am sold on doing it.

A side note, the book Founders At Work is an awesome read!
The powerset demo is at an event - where the money is going on putting on the event. Powerset isn't the only company demoing there. This guy just has the wrong end of the stick.

Any news.yc'ers going to SFbeta on tuesday? - shoot me an email.
If you are only after millions and not billions, there is generally always business room for a #2, 3, 4, etc. Different UI and customer acquisition processes will naturally create different niches. Even if these niches are way smaller than the biggest group, they could still make very lucrative businesses if operated intelligently.

In classifieds in particular, there is often incentive to list the item multiple places if you want to move it quickly. Spillover from the largest sites alone could create a nice business.
Sapient did: http://michael.yoon.org/arsdigita, search for them on the page. Dell may have - I read Direct from Dell but don't remember him ever mentioning anything about the VC process.

Perhaps a few others did as well, but you're right, they're pretty rare. Microsoft took a mezzanine round right before IPO; Apple, Google, and Sun all had VC funding nearly from the start.
These are college classifieds. Most of their target market visits their main competitor every day. The number two or three general classifieds site could maybe make a dollar or two, but when you're that marginalized in a niche market, the chances of success are pretty slim.

I'm sure the people behind this site have other ideas, and the opportunity cost of continuing to pursue this one probably isn't worth it. Best of luck to them.
One App, One User Account and Multiple OpenIDs
I haven't seen the old logo, but this is what I think from seeing this current one.

- The dot in the "O" sort of looks like a nipple.

- I think both words should be in the same typeface. You could still italicize the first word or style it however. The extended "F" from Focus works well.

- The lead-in "tail" of the S (lead-in tail? does that make sense?) needs to be reworked so it fits in.
Understanding Engineers: Feasibility
Instead of just not charging beta users, imagine paying them a small thank-you fee ... might be a good way to get early adopters really on your side.
How about reverse vesting instead of normal vesting? This may alleviate some of the tax consequences of someone that wants to leave early.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/07/17.html
There's also http://www.ycsearch.com which does a decent job.
Well if they can get 100,000 live listings and they can get average views up to about 1 a day per listing (seems doable at their rate with organic traffic and such) and get $10CPM off of Adsense or whatever (~ what I get across my ad-based sites), then they're talking $1000/day or $365K a year. If it costs essentially $0 to operate and it is one or two people, that is a decent salary (especially for one). Additionally, if it costs hardly anything to maintain (including their time), they can run this thing for cash and work on other things at the same time.

Also most of their target market may visit FB every day, but not all. And some will just search the Internet for listings. Some of course go to craigslist and other sites. And plenty of non-college people could see the listings too through Internet searches and contact the college kids. There are lots of opportunities here.

I guess what I'm saying is if they want to give up and give me their site, I'm sure I can make some money off it given their decent start without trying to hard (read using much of my time) :)
Personally, I liked the wavy stream in the old logo better, but it's nothing I can justify; I just did. :~)
I think its pretty good, I like the different fonts. The lead-in tail of the 'S' looks to have one or two more pixels then the actual lower part of the 'S'.

The 'O' - While it does look kinda like a nipple, it also is a designy(word?) way of a target, bullseye or focus point - so I get that and I like that.
:) - that version was definitely more fun.

The reason for the change was to be a little less playful and a little more serious. The stream symbol on the old version was a meandering stream, now we have a fast stream - the idea being that our application helps you work a lot faster and smarter.
I was going to write that you should just hire a graphics designer so you can focus on your startup, but I think the biggest point is that you are targetting the wrong people.
We're asking for advice from as many areas as we can, but we tend to get great feedback here as the YCers tend to pay more attention to design than others. We probably will hire a graphic designer at some point, but its much cheaper to spend a few hours ourselves (and I am an architect with distinct ideas about design) than put our money in a graphic designer at the moment as we are bootstrappers. I think our next major expense will be lawyers.
That's an interesting idea -- I would imagine that there's a lot of commonality between the legal paperwork you need for most early-stage startups, and when differences exist, they can often be parameterized reasonably well ("$a founders, $b equity pool, $c shares per founder, vesting according to schedule $d", etc.). Putting some common templates for this kind of paperwork up on a wiki somewhere would be useful, I think.
You're the second person to make the nipple comment - you definitely have your mind in the right place :)

For the typeface, I'm trying to hint at the meaning of the ideas with the words - which may be a mistake. The stream being more "fluid" and wider, the focus being precise. We'll try it with the same font to see how it looks too.

Good point on the lead in tail - that is a problem with the font - but I will definitely fix that.
(Before the edit, you had asked me to say what I thought was wrong, so since I already typed this list out, here it is.)

Again, please don't think I'm insulting your intelligence or programming skills when I critique it..

1) Way too big

2) Created in Photoshop or GIMP, which are for photo editing

3) By an amateur

4) No kerning adjustment has been made

5) Saved as a JPG instead of a GIF, with artifacts

6) Won't resize properly even if it was the perfect logo because it's not a vector image

7) You took both words and made them look like what each word is. As if 1-6 didn't make it look amateur already, this does it even more.

8) There is no ... what's the word I'm looking for.. cohesion between the meaning. I guess there is no... focus. Yes, there are lines connecting the two words but there is no cohesion between the meaning.

9) One color in an already amateur-looking logo signals the person is even more of an amateur.

10) The color was popular in 1997.

11) If not amateur, then it looks cheap and makes the company look cheap.

12) Not something you could fix.

13) The kerning issue, though already mentioned, keeps jumping out on me.

14) The bar by the S doesn't even go smoothly into the S.

15) The dot in the word Focus makes me feel like we're talking about contact lenses.

16) Why? Because you literally used no creativity and went with the gut instinct to choose a font that looks like the Focus-brand logo shown on Television (maybe subconsciously) without thinking about what it should look like in terms of a project management software.
http://www.us.cibavision.com/lenses/focus_dailies/progressiv...

You should pay somebody with graphical design experience $50 to create any type of logo in 10 minutes.

It won't be so great you will use it all your life (though you might), but at the very least, I'm confident it won't look 'cheap' if the designer has any experience. Your goal here is not to spend $5,000 on a perfect logo... But some small amount on a logo that doesn't look CHEAP.
Thanks - we'll fix that lead-in tail. Maybe having a slight "sexual" connotation for the women focused isn't such a bad thing? :)
Thank you very much Vlad for taking the time to comment so thoroughly.

4. The kerning point is a good one - we'll work on that.
5. The original is photoshop text (scalable), but saved as jpg because the gif with transparency had terrible aliasing.

8. Hmm, this one I don't know how to respond to as you object to using meaning for the fonts. Facebook and Google, do they have cohesion between the meaning?
9. One color fonts are used a lot in logos. (Our prior version had 2 colors)
11. Cheap is definitely bad.
12. Hmm
13. The kerning is easy to fix
14. We are fixing that
15. ok
16. I had no idea about the focus-brand logo. The Ottawa font is my favorite font - I use it for all of my firm's correspondence. I found it in 1995 actually - it is beautiful and very easy to read. The font used for the Focus brand logo is quite different - definitely not as elegant as Ottawa.
The question is a strange one. If you need to have fought tooth and nail to get emotional investment, how do you get the emotional investment to fight tooth and nail in first place? Or put another way: by that line of reasoning, won't you have the required emotional investment after the first couple "highs and lows"?

It's true that we're prone to attach emotionally to stuff that we've suffered to get, and you may use that to your advantage. Most of the time, though, you'll have to fight against that instinct. Otherwise, you'll be unable to see bad early ideas for what they are, and you'll resist rolling them back even when it's the rational thing to do. All because you have invested too much of your time, effort, and ego in them.

Did the author's motivation on Open Source Food come from having fought tooth and nail to start it up? He took a week to build OSF. One week is nothing to fight tooth and nail over. His motivation comes from building something he'd want to use.

Now, he never got told what to build in first place, so he could have made Open Source Food instead of 8apps and Pikki, and have the emotional investment and the money.

I don't think his initial setup was a good one, but the reason is not that their beginnings were too easy.
That's the short term.
Two examples of logos designed by successful companies with names made by joining two words:

http://microsoft.com
http://facebook.com

Note how much effort has been put in differentiating the style of the two words. If you find good counterexamples, let me know.
Its a good point - and I've been thinking that my over symbolizing of the words may be the wrong approach. It's definitely important that the name of the company can be thought of as a single unit.
Thanks for the shout out and ideas..I would put the emphasis on two things:

1 - with free listings (both on the FB marketplace and on other classified sites) there is no limit to where a student would post to get exposure

2- there is plenty of distribution/technology opportunities outside of Facebook. Granted facebook is a huge platform that is impossible to compete with - we know that. But people use other sites and always will, and there is always room for innovation. For example, Facebook doesn't have a global marketplace search.

-Dan
DormItem
I'd even suggest changing the name to Streamfocus (lowercase f).

Another thing you won't be seeing much in good logos is graphic tricks embedded in the text. Zero is best, one is acceptable if it's well done, but best avoided if you're unsure. More than that and you're probably looking silly.

The only graphic addition in your logo that I don't fully dislike is the dot in the O, but it doesn't fit well there since the inner edge of the O is not round, but elliptical. If you want the dot you should change the O, and I don't think it's worth it.

My advice is: just pick a font you like, render the name in a program that does kerning and antialiasing right, and move on to other stuff. A logo won't turn corporate customers away by looking boring; looking cheap is the most serious danger.

[Edit: And I agree with vlad it's too big.]
I'm getting one of the startups in this batch to write it for us, using their product.
I agree. You'd be better off just using a single typeface. Works for Apple.
PriceFad Tracks & Charts Product History
I think when you say "firefox os" you really mean "browser-based UI for Linux," right? You are already supposing that Linux (an actual operating system) exists underneath.

Isn't Internet Explorer + Windows Explorer + Web Folders pretty much doing this already? Windows' Web Folders feature lets you store documents remotely and access them over HTTP from regular (non-web-enabled) applications. Internet Explorer lets you browse the local filesystem and the web from the same browser window pretty seamlessly.

It seems that Firefox is indeed becoming an application deployment platform. However, it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Instead of having one package manager in the operating system, there will be two: one system package manage and one Firefox package manager. There are all kinds of security and manageability problems with that. Already, there are many buggy Firefox plugins that cripple the browser, effectively causing a DOS attack with crashes and decreased performance. This is a good indication that we should not have confidence in Firefox's abilities to manage third party applications. Really Firefox should be in that business at all, since resource allocation and crash prevention are fundamentally operating system features.

The right solution is to improve the installation experience provided by the operating system, and have it provide security-oriented integration capabilities for applications (as opposed to to the performance-oriented integration capabilities we have now). This would require the operating system to provide a sandboxed environment by default to downloaded applications. The OS needs to provide a middle ground between the almost unrestricted access given to today's downloaded applications, and the totally restricted access given to web apps; that access needs to be very close to the web app side.

With this kind of severely-limited sandbox, we can then eliminate the whole UI of application installation. Instead of installation, we would just have caching. Instead of a list of programs in "Add/Remove Programs," we would just have a "Free up XXX MB of disk space" page.
Too bad the THE/Archy project seems discontinued. Reminds me of Chris Crawford's efforts in interactive fiction: very interesting and sound ideas that aren't going anywhere because they depart too radically from what people are used to.
I have a bit of a conflict of interest on this topic, being a developer for a window manager, but I also have some rarely expressed opinions because of that point of view. So, keep that in mind when reading my comments below.

This is an idea I've heard before. I agree that everything in the world is going to the web. File systems will become distributed. Every application you use will come from the internet, with the exception of your kernel and the software needed to retrieve the applications. They'll probably run remotely, too, and just send you the graphics/UI.

However, I think that turning the web browser into a window manager is going in the wrong direction. It completely disobeys the Unix philosophy of writing programs that do one thing well. Firefox's role in the future should be rendering and running remote applications. Organizing the apps using tabs, MDI, windows, workspaces, viewports, etc. should be left to the people who are spending all of their time thinking about how to organize applications.
What's the deal with BizDev? pt. 2
In the case I referenced, the costs were very high, and the returns were 0. IBM bought our main competitor and we shelved the project. No one actually needed an OS/390 port.

Yes, it's only one datapoint, but I've seen that pattern far too often in my years. I just posted a link to part 2 of the article. Enjoy
is that just "search terms" site:http://news.ycombinator.com ?
I'm amazed that people ignore speed as a critical issue when thinking about web vs desktop apps. I mean, think about why folks evangelize the CLI.

I'm fine with persistent information across platforms/computers through server synch. I'm not sure you even need a browser for that for most applications, but it is a convenient platform.

But it can't be all web.
What do you mean by "any missing os functionality"?
Netflix To Lower Online DVD Rental Fees