skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bwahahahahaah!

Financial security as a selling point? What percentage of founders do you think achieve financial security as a result of a startup? 80% of small biz's fail in the first 5 years. A big percentage of the rest are "walking wounded" - doing well enough to pay the grocery bills, but certainly not secure.

Startups are high-risk / high-gain bets.

The best way to sell it is, "It's what I want to do. It's what would make me happy."

Presumably you have a relationship where that's important to both parties, right?

Setting an expiration date and a personal investment cap is good, too. i.e. "I want to try this for two years, and then let's re-evaluate. I'd like us to take on no more than $100k in debt, which is considerably less than a mortgage." And, dazzling her with visions of fabulous wealth can't hurt either. Bury her in articles about geeks who have built stoopid little web apps and made zillions of dollars.
Brad Feld Proposes a Solution to the "Facebook Problem"
Flip implies a very quick sell to turn a fast profit. Building to flip and building something up that you personally acknowledge to be valuable to other companies is very different.

Yes, startup founders may acknowledge to themselves that an acquisition is their goal for an exit. But that acknowledgment is at the start. In the groundwork. You don't focus on trying to sell throughout -- you just try on making something people will want to use.
Add a way to contact another user directly, not necessarily Personal Message, maybe something along the lines of sending an email address from one user to another privately.

The current method seems to be posting your email address in the comments with something like, "Hey, email me about that . . ."
I lean towards .com, unless you can get a really good and distinctive .net.

I probably would not consider a .org.
An interesting Startup to find people sharing similar interests
Wow.. Well, where I work it's nowhere near that bad. Everyone's fully punctional(tm) and coherent, except one guy (an artist). He makes up for it by being a totally awesome person. ;)

Writing skills are usually a must though.
That's not a whole range of ambitions. It's either "Get bought" or Facebook/Google.

"During the acquisition talks, ... The one refrain we heard quite often was from Paul, who reminded us in nearly every conversation: "Deals fall through!"

Seems like you were shopping Reddit.com vigorously. Let's do a naive calculation:

1. YComb startup: 3-4 people - $20k - $25k
2. Assume Acquisition price: $5M to $10M
3. Assume 6% shares: $300k - $600k
4. Assume 10% shares: $500k - $1M
5. Minus lawyer, legal stuff: $10k - $20k

Profit:
6% - at least $250k - able to fund at least 5-6 more YCs
10% - at least $450k - able to fund at least 12 more YCs

Assuming half companies died, you still can fun tons more.

Now, if you look at the companies you funded, probably only 1 company out of 5 that can stand as long as Loopt. Others are just developing "feature". "Feature" companies should be flipped ASAP otherwise they're not going to stay long. Logically, it's true that you'll make more money if the companies don't sell early, but the odd says otherwise, you have to sell most of your companies if YC wants to sustain itself.

YC has a good business model I'd say. Plus you are elevating your value in public (think of conference, talks, book agreements and such) and building your network with all the bigs in Sillicon Valley (companies and VC).
That's true... But you can do your darndest to put something GREAT in front of users... Because the "release early, release often" religion is currently so dominant, it's pretty common to see people release stuff that they KNOW is mediocre with the hopes that their users will help them make it good.

The "... if we did it this way, we could get it out the door in a few weeks.." argument is only sound if what you get out the door is a damn good attempt to solve the core problem in the simplest/most effective way possible.
Also, I can't type  (that's a (tm)) without Â appearing before it. Unicode problem? To reproduce, go to a text box and hold ALT. Press 00153 on the number keypad, then release ALT, then post.
but what about the profile-page widgets?
Apple - iPhone - A Guided Tour
I am posting these links to videos about the iPhone to YC, because I think its vary interesting to look at how Apple is creating insane hype about the iPhone. It's interesting to see how they are releasing more videos and adverts about it every couple of days...
I guess now's a good time if you are looking to join a startup. Just hang outside the googleplex handing out resumes to the guys driving the nicest cars who are leaving the earliest.
Launching Fluther.com - Comments from YCers?
I would say that his traffic is less "defendable" than a stand-alone site.
It's similar to Yahoo Answers or Ask Metafilter, with some new twists like real-time discussion, questions filtered for you, and IM integration.

Now that we finally completed it we're climbing out from our cave and wondering if the site can fly, and how we help attract people to it.

Any comments or advice?

Link: http://www.fluther.com
You forgot about Step 2.
One of the YC dinner speakers was a Googler - that's how it got started. Later on we approached him, gave a demo, and that is how the ball got rolling.

I also don't know for sure but I assume the YC partners helped talk us up to all the speakers - which couldn't have hurt.

And while we didn't not want our product to be bought by Google, it certainly wasn't the goal we set out with. We wanted to create a compelling product and make sure every week at YC dinners somebody asked "how did you do that?".

- Robby
fluther is such a hard name to say.
http://www.grabagooddomain.com/ (taken from davidw's comment)
" "If you want to indicate stronger emphasis, use all capital letters and toss in some extra exclamation points," Ms. Sherwood advises in her guide, available at www.webfoot.com, where she offers a vivid example:

"Should I boost the power on the thrombo?

"NO!!!! If you turn it up to eleven, you'll overheat the motors, and IT MIGHT EXPLODE!!""

Well, yes. If the consequences are fatal, an all-caps message is a good idea. But intensifiers only stay intense if they're used rarely -- if you're always fucking swearing, for example, you can't use swearing to express anyfuckingthing.
The interface is pretty slick looking. However, I would size down the fonts a bit.. they are slightly large for smaller monitors IMHO.

Fluther is a bit hard to say but its unique and sufficiently catchy. I would stick with it.

To expand you should try attacking some focused niche areas.. Make it highly useful to a small group of people first.

Good work
Thanks for the thoughts. Targeting a niche is an interesting idea. We'll also look more into the fonts.
Sold to the highest bidder
Did Colin Powell ever even talk about intending to run for President? Not saying he didn't, just that I never heard about it.
If anyone knows how to fix this, let me know. Someone told me I could fix it by adding a tag saying

meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"

within the head on every page, but this had no effect. Would appreciate it if anyone could tell me what I'm doing wrong.
Who Will Be The YouTube Of Live Video? (mentions justin.tv)
"E-mail is a party to which English teachers have not been invited," Dr. Hogan said.

"hI KATHY i am sending u the assignmnet again," one student wrote to her recently. "i had sent you the assignment earlier but i didnt get a respond. If u get this assgnment could u please respond . thanking u for ur cooperation."

__Most of her students are midcareer professionals in high-tech industries,__ Ms. Keenan said.
VentureBoard: Sell your company
If you are securing a domain for a mass market application then you MUST get the .com. Even very clever and well known sites such as del.icio.us also own .com (delicious.com). Many people simply type in the 'name' of a site and let their browsers complete the address, which of course always adds .com.

Why would you take the chance on .net or .org? Because it is easier for you to get a name or because it is easier for a user to remember and browse to it.
I like this one: WUP: The Waterfall Unified Process
Pretty good looking. It could be a nice community. Here's my thoughts on improvement:

Put the active questions on the top of the home page instead of a big blank form. I really didn't know what I was supposed to ask a jelly-fish the first time I loaded the page. Try easing visitors into contributing to your site. They're first going to only read questions, then they'll reply to them, and then they'll start asking their own. Make browsing the first thing to do on the page.
So why would I use fluther.com instead of yahoo answers which has a lot more people answering. What is the unique proposition now that there are several others like askville.com (from amazon) and others that have significantly more traffic ?
I want to answer the question, but didnt want to join another site - why can i not answer anonymously ?

Just pointers to questions I ask myself as a potential user

Hope it helps ...
"Our mission is not to make Google as big as possible; it is to organize the world's information," says Laszlo Bock, vice president of people operations at Google. "If we seed the next 200 great startups, that's no bad thing."

I never looked at it this way. If Google is the catalyst of many successful startups in the future, that's also a way to leave an overall positive impact on the world. A surprisingly grown-up way of looking at things.
Brilliant, I'd love to have such a translator.
The twists are good, but do I need them ? and it surely wasn't very clearly pointed out as your USP on the site - concentrate on your USP - make sure its highlighted ...
Now that's what I'm talking about. :) Thanks for the info, and congrats!
We didn't shop reddit. Conde Nast found them. We didn't even know anyone at Conde Nast till they bought reddit.

Nor would we intentionally fund a startup that had no prospect of making money as an independent company. It's crazy to count on getting bought, because acquirers are so unpredictable.
Slick design -- I especially liked the serene, nerdy Cthulhu in the corner. I'm not sure a real-time question preview is especially useful, but it sure looks good.
Depends on the audience and exactly how many characters you're talking about.

Is the comparison more like A or B below?

A.

myphotos.net

mycoolphotos.com

B.

photos.net

thephotositookatthebarlastnight.com
Don't touch the fonts. They're perfect. The bigger font gives the feeling of simplicity, don't lose that.

If you allow anonymous posting (and manage to control spam at the same time), you could have a winner. People hate to register to do a simple thing like asking or answering a question.

The UI is nice and easy to use. Great job there.
Somewhat less than an ETrade user.
That last one is a great idea for a startup! You better not tell anyone. Hey, sign this NDA.
Unfortunately, this idea doesn't scale. I hope all the best to you and millions of greens, though.
already working on it.
yahoo bought delicious.com when they bought del.icio.us

they have the money to pay a couple hundred k for a domain. but it was after the fact, not before.

that being said. having the .com is a very smart move.
I agree with lizherring. The fonts are just right.

The designer cult has trained people to think small fonts look more professional or classy or something. Big fonts are jaunty and friendly. It suits this interface perfectly.

Otherwise jsjenkins is spot on. Niches can be a valuable place to gain traction.
This is why I take honors writing classes alongside my CS degree, despite my counselor's caution that it's "unnecessary."
[SF or Anywhere] Venture Hacks is looking for a One (Wo)man Developer Army
Hiya,

I hope you don't mind if I put this job posting up here. I have seen other non-YC companies doing it so I thought I would tag along. Please let me know if it is inappropriate.

--

ONE (WO)MAN DEVELOPER ARMY

We're looking for a one (wo)man developer army who wants to work with Venture Hacks to build our next product. It's in a $25 billion market filled with lame products and unsatisfied customers.

We're also offering a $1000 referral bounty if we hire someone you refer.

ABOUT US

Naval and I have started companies like Epinions and Songbird where we've raised $100M+ from investors like Sequoia. Read our full bios for the whole story.

Now, we've gone crazy for helping entrepreneurs build their businesses. You already know about our first product: Term Sheet Hacks. The hacks will keep coming--unsolicited reviews from the founders of Flixster and "Hot or Not" call the hacks "much needed" and "fantastic".

The next Venture Hacks product is going to serve a $25 billion market and make it even easier for entrepreneurs to raise money. It's going to be a lot of fun to build it and take over the universe (or something smaller like a galaxy).

ABOUT YOU

Contribution: Build a great user experience and back-end. Social software experience is a plus. Full-time or consulting works for us. Develop with whatever tools and language you think are best for the project.

Compensation: Salary is above market and stock is way above market.

Contact: Send links to your best work to nivi@venturehacks.com. Please include one or two sentences that describe why you have a high level of ability.

Gracias!
Stevey's Blog Rants: Rich Programmer Food
The bug is, you can't type a unicode character like â¢ (that's a (tm).. alt-00153 on the number pad) without garbage showing up. He asks:

"If anyone knows how to fix this, let me know. Someone told me I could fix it by adding a tag saying

meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"

within the head on every page, but this had no effect. Would appreciate it if anyone could tell me what I'm doing wrong." -pg
An idea to differentiate and make some money: Take the questions that have good and well thought out answers and then figure out which products/services the answers pertain to.

Example: What is the best alarm clock?

Keyword them and also figure out which Google Adwords they fit with. Also, create an appropriate affiliate link to the product/services mentioned in the answers. Have a script that buys the appropriate Adwords and creates a link to the product that was chosen to be the 'best'. When people search for "alarm clock" on Google they see an ad for the question/answer/discussion at Fluther, they go there to read about it, then buy it via the link. You earn affiliate commissions. Also, you establish yourselves as the "useful, action oriented answer site". Or whatever.

There are many obvious permutations of this scheme.
Job Board Reviews
"My advice to entrepreneurs is simple, and that is to focus on building products that customers are willing to pay for."

He could have replaced the entire article with that.
Oh man, that name is a legal nightmare. Why would they paint a giant red target on themselves like that?
This is an interesting idea... I worry that the outgoing revenue would not be enough to offset the adword costs, but it's something to consider.
Setting the charset on each page is necessary but not sufficient.

My guess: you also need to tell the browser to send form data as utf8. Perhaps by specifying "accept-charset" as UTF-8 in each form tag.
Should you make a potential lawyer sign an NDA before revealing your idea?
If you are talking to a lawyer, trying to get a feel for whether or not you would like to retain them, should you be worried about them potentially stealing your business idea? If so, is an NDA necessary, and will a lawyer even consider signing, or is this whole issue taken care of by professional legal ethics?

[Of course, if a lawyer/firm started taking ideas they would quickly get a bad rep and it would probably damage their business more than they would gain from the idea. But just wondering anyways.]
Great mashup guys! I like the cloud toggle switch.
> I don't know why everyone seems to think we encourage founders to sell early

I didn't say "sell early". I'm talking about getting bought. I've read about how other YC-backed startups got early acquisition offers but didn't take them -- because they were too low.

Selling early really has nothing to do with it except as a correlation with offers that are usually going to be lowballing. The operative distinction is selling cheaply.
The problem is in your input handling. You are getting latin-1 value for the (tm) sign (\x99, decimal 156), and you are treating that as if it was some unicode code point 156, which AFAIK is nonsense.

When you try to encode that bogus thing in utf-8 you get \xc3\x99, which in latin-1 is A-with-circumflex followed by the TM sign, while in utf-8 it's still nonsense.

What you need to do is decode your input from the remote system encoding into your native unicode representation, before encoding it in utf-8 to display it.

The first problem is detecting the native encoding at the other end. I don't know how to do this, but if you assume latin-1 to begin with, it will still be an improvement over the current situation.

Once you know/guess the encoding, you normalize it with something like this (in mzScheme):

(bytes->string/latin-1 remote-txt)

Then you convert to utf-8 like this (you are already doing this):

(string->bytes/utf-8 stored-string)

Finally, remember to put back the meta tag.

HTH.
Democrats formally propose higher tax on VCs, others
There are probably 1000 more important things to worry about.
Well, this is certainly an argument for more simple languages (syntactically) like LISP, C, even Tcl, over C++ and Java. Because I don't think anyone really understands how the C++ compiler really works (it took a looooong time to get a C++ compiler that actually adhered to the standard).
Well, I look forward to it. You have a great community here to seed a reddit clone.
A Domain By Any Other Name Would Not Rank As Well
So they can be famous :-)
If that works it would be better than guessing. :)

Since you are sanitizing the input string, I still recommed translating to native mzScheme/Arc unicode, doing the transformations in that format, then retranslating back to utf-8 for display. The call to get a canonical string from utf-8 is:

(bytes->string/utf-8 input-txt)
I'm not sure I agree with you that Steve Jobs ideas about technology have improved with age. His ideas 20 years ago were just as groundbreaking (for the time) as his current ones.
Exactly which of the YC companies can realistically go public? And who's going to sink that kind of money into them?

You said success 98% of the time means getting bought, which means you want them to get bought, and invest on that basis. They are acquisition targets.

Nobody's going public these days, even the gigantic sites. I don't buy that investors "want" you to go public except in a "wishing for a pony" sense. If they aren't actively planning for an IPO, they're betting on a buyout, and investing on that basis, so that's what they want.
If you didn't want to be acquired, you wouldn't be in acquisition talks. You'd decline, if approached.

Hence if you are in acquisition talks, the impression you are going to give is that you want to be acquired. Even if you pretend you don't.
Yeah, that's useful to hear. Right now, certainly our user base is much smaller than the big guys, but that smallness also gives it a real sense of community--plus lots of our users are quite smart. This is a challenge, though.

As far as anonymous questions/answers, we've thought about it a lot and we think it's a necessary tool in maintaining the community and ensuring people take it seriously. But it wasn't an easy call.

Thanks for the feedback.
You actually thought all the startups you funded could make money as independent companies, at the time you funded them?

I thought your model was a kind of a "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" approach. Then triage the promising ones, with the explicit understanding that a lot of the startups would lack prospects.
Great looking site. The idea... in spite of tons of very similar sites out there... A little weak. Unless I am missing something.

Good luck though.
Hmmm, this is interesting feedback. One reason we put the ask in the forefront is to help make it obvious what the site's about, plus to encourage new questions (which is also the best way to get into the site).

But I see what you're saying about flow. I'll have to digest this one. Thanks.
I wouldn't put c++ in the same category as Java. C++ has many layers of "stuff" (templates, macros, etc) while the Java compiler is so simple that you can easily do a reverse-compile.

Personally, I'd rather have a useful syntax and maybe a standard parser that gives easy access to the parse tree. I wrote a Javascript-to-Javascript compiler (that did optimization and correctness checks along the way) once and the fact that JS has syntax wasn't a big problem. (especially since I ripped off the parser from Rhino)
And if I may abuse this thread to add one request, please store the raw string as you got it from the browser, and do the processing before displaying it (unless you determine that would be a security risk or a performance killer). If I use ampersand tags or other formatting to write a comment, they are lost when I edit it. It's kinda irritating to lose the indentation of a code sample (lots of &nbsp;s) when editing out a mistake. :)
I would seriously consider not requiring people to get an account in order to answer a question.
Goodbye di.fm. I will always love you.
Java has much simpler syntax than C, you got your buckets wrong.
VC DO NOT WANT BOOTSTRAPERZ ROOL
The comparison is more between A and B and targeted towards a business audience.
Enlightenment is 11 bucks away. :)

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-Fourth-William-Strunk/dp/0205313426/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0126140-9313474?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182549113&sr=8-1
Finally the dude started blogging again. I am in no position to prove him right or wrong, but his emphasis on parsing/mining skills is very understandable.

Simplifying, commercial software does (mostly) two things: collects data and transforms data. Too many programmers focus on the later ignoring the former. For instance, designing and running cool algorithms on a some sort of a giant graph is cool indeed, but parsing and representing a real-world data in a form of graph is boring and challenging.

"Web 2.0" likes it easy way: "Users will bring you data themselves" :)
Seems like it would make more sense to do it directly, though, than funnel millions out the door with no return.

A Google investment fund.
Interview with cofounders of Xobni
Nice design, I like the wallpaper on the edges, the borders around the form fields. Also the h3 Rockwell font, don't see that one too often.
I think he has more good info than just that. What do you do once you HAVE assets people will pay for?

"Never sell your company for shares in a VC backed startup, there are just too many ways you can end up playing the role of Rube Suckerman in that story."
Wall. Of. Text.

Seriously, is it necessary?
From the day we opened in February to the day we closed in July we were barely in business six months.

Unless it was all of February and all of July, try five months. I guess that's one of the details he was talking about. Ironic.
I disagree. If I had to look for the ask box, I'd probably pass the site over.

Most people will be drawn to this site to ask questions first. Its in the right spot.
That's all beside the point.

The point is what results you get.
Yes. I don't think start-ups need to be super-careful about hiring, they need to be careful about evaluating and retaining. The only way you know if someone is good or not is to give them a shot.

I would have no trouble hiring someone, but they have to get up to speed quickly, as I also have no trouble firing someone. Hiring should be flexible and provisional.
Does anyone find frivolous company perks to be insulting?
Feb 1 / Mar 2 / Apr 3 / May 4 / June 5 / July 6

... barely six months
Define "frivolous"