skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While we're on the topic, PG mentions in one of his essays a few languages with a "reputation for succintness": Forth, Joy, Icon. They are all tiny blips on my radar, popping up once every year in some obscure article. Does anybody have experience with them, and are they worth learning? (Forth is already covered on this page)
Is rejection of authority more common now? The stereotypical Millennial (according to marketers and social scientists who do lots of polling) has more respect for authority than either "Gen Xers" or baby boomers.

The same people will argue that todays 20-somethings are more collaborative and also less patient. One could argue that these latter characteristics might foster entrepreneurship.

What I think is most important is:
1. Demographics. There are a lot of "young adults" these days, and typically the young have a greater tolerance for risk. They typically don't have mortgages or kids.

2. Expectations. ~15 years ago we saw the first wave of "downsizing." Previously, people had reasonable expectation that if they were loyal to their employer, their employer would be loyal to them. Todays young adults have no such expectation, and many of them have witnessed the aftermath of putting too much faith in an employer both through their parents and grandparents.

3. Declining needs for capital. It's been said repeatedly, but it's just so much cheaper to start up a company.
What Else Is New?  How uses, not innovations, drive human technology.
The same magical place most web startups get their income from.
I'm pretty skeptical too. I don't think Clay gives nearly enough credit to people's ability to learn new things and forget the past.

I asked the two nearest people (one young, one old) the VCR/PC and radio/phone questions. The old one answered telephone without hesitation, and had to think about VCR. The young one did just the opposite. And, Mike Ramsay was in his 40s when he started Tivo.
Thanks for the idea but I have no plan to join nor start a start-up.

I'm just trying to find a way to be as free as possible while feeding myself.
What is different in the case of biotech? Can you elaborate? Why do you think the model doesn't work? Do you need equipment? Or is your biotech startup purely based on software?
This writer uses Tivo as an example of something that could not have been founded by older people. Well actually Tivo was founded by Silicon valley veterans Barton and Ramsay. Not exactly young. More like 40+ somethings. Bad example.
I don't think most YC start-ups are doing what they love -- they are doing something to get rich. That's how you get a group of people together to work hard on something. Programming is mostly tedium, and nobody loves that -- why would Arc be taking so long otherwise? Once you don't have to work, and have money, and can do what you "love", I think you'll find most people become indolent.
Oh and if you were interested in the sequence they go in - start on the 5th page with the last one and move backwards. Obviously You tube orders them with the first last.
arrington's response:

http://www.techcrunch20.com/blog/2007/05/18/answers-to-a-few-frequently-asked-questions/#comment-45
Incredible rip-off of YC. However, it doesn't look like too bad a deal...

They sound like "Mr. Skipper" to YC's "Dr. Pepper". I like to drink rootbeer... not sure what that signifies.
Oops, should have guessed since the link came from you. He's got a great pitch, I've seen far worse!
i cant differentiate between a venue or a keyword in the description of the event without a predecessor to what the user is searching for. I understand that users are used to using a search query by typing a keyword and relevant results come up. but i've used a different approach... by typing a phrase as you would say it when filling the blank "Search for events __________"...
I hope this isn't true. I'm not sure about YC start ups but I know that I'm in this field because I love it. If you just want to get rich there are certainly easier ways to do that (e.g. real estate, investment banking).
The problem with the colored balls example is that the person drawing the balls from the bag assumes the balls are i.i.d. (independently identically distributed). Put in real world terms, according to the example entrepreneurs believe their field is unchanging. I don't think many entrepreneurs believe this. If the person drawing balls from the bag doesn't make this (wrong) assumption, then he is not at any disadvantage for having seen more draws from the bag.
View3 are 2/3 Indian, I believe. Also on student visas at Stanford, if I recall correctly.
But, I understand getting a work visa can be challenging and time-consuming. Temporary for the 3 months might not be as big of a problem...Auctomatic came from England for YC and only stayed 90 days (with plans to return ASAP). Maybe Kulveer or Harj will chime in with what they had to go through to make it happen.
Think about how much capital is necessary to get a biotech firm off the ground, let along an actual drug to market.
The problem is this article is using scientific buzzwords to explain something that can be explained without the buzzwords. 300 years ago, "calculus", 50 years ago FFT, 15 years ago "Chaos Theory, 10 years ago, "Wavelets" and apparently now, "Bayesian statistics."

You raise a good point. I'm afraid that debating the essay on its technical merits will lead you to a fruitless discussion.
Could try selling virtual goods.
Fair comment. But I have used F# a little which is heavily influence from OCaml. IMHO until you have atleast a soft real time problem that you are solving, it just isn't worth worrying about code performance. It's more important to worry about developer performance. I know that type inference does help with that.

My bad I didn't follow the scala link. But the post says, "lift code is as clean and brief as Rails, yet performs 6 times faster and is multithreaded. Additionally, because Scala is strongly typed, the compiler catches type errors."

To me these aren't real advantages. It's like Java having a lot of libraries. So what, it still takes 3 times as long to do anything in it. Who care if there is more code to go around.
What to do when your co-founder takes a backseat?
my co-founder has decided to take more of a back seat in return for less equity but also less initial investment. we have been working on the project for a few months. i think he realised he is not THAT into internet businesses/ideas/projects. What do you reckon I should do? get another co-founder?
Sorry, but I think that is complete bullshit. Why should some beginner start with Lisp and Haskell? He should start with something that is useful for him, that is, he should consider what he wants to do, pick a suitable programming language and get started.

Nothing against LISP, but if he was into Web programming for instance, I think it would be a bad choice. Maybe an experienced programmer could leverage the power of LISP for that task, but a beginner needs good documentation, examples to look at, a community to ask when he is stuck etc. I don't think LISP would be top of the list in those categories.
The psychology of banner ads
Google homepage breaks basic web design rule
Microsoft pays $6B for online Ad company
Try grazing. I recommend the open range.
Battle the bloat with 7 svelte browsers
Yahoo Maps upgrade -- too Little, too Late
$6bn for aQuantive? Did Microsoft "loose its head?"
Thanks for posting this. I can't believe nobody else voted you up. I agree that lines of code is irrelevant. It shouldn't be five lines of code, of course, but the actual amount doesn't matter.
#1: Institutional investors in biotech require patents for funding. Period. Without a patent, there is no funding. If you don't have a patent, you're probably stepping on someone else's IP. Unlike software patents, life science patents are real and enforceable.

#2: There are regulatory issues for most biotech startups. This means you may need 3 years of cash to burn before you have a chance of seeing revenue.

#3: Startup costs are all around higher. Just about always, biotech startups need specialized high end lab equipment in very specific lab spaces. The only lab I've found that will take me is in San Jose and is $3,000 a month. The _only_ commercial lab space in Pittsburgh is with a state sponsored institutional investor and they only give space to portfolio companies.

A YC for biotech would need to be a true incubator with office/lab space. And you'd have to give each team $100,000. In biotech, $100,000 is equivalent to the "living expenses only" money that YC gives out.

It could very well work and I'd love to see it but someone would have to put up a very, very large amount of capital for something very risky by the standards of biotech investment.
How did you choose the name for your web company?
I'm in the midst of working on a couple of different ideas for a web app and am having a hard time coming up with good names. Any advice?
Instead of learning C or C++ you may consider D which will enable you to learn more about actual programming and less about the idiosyncrasies of C/C++.
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17449
Apple Gets FCC Approval for iPhone
Insteresting thread on JavaFX, GWT, and Silverlight
"In the future, being a developer on someone's platform will mean being hosted on their infrastructure."

What about Moore's law, though? In 20 years one might be able to buy a PC with the calculating capacity of Google's whole server farm for a couple of thousand bucks...
Most embarrasing enterpreneurial Experiences
Teenwag because it is the fastest growing teen social network
the article seems to be suggesting, the older you are, the less original your thinking can be. we know this is not necessarily true but is it generally true? though the "idea" is central to a start-up, older entrepreneurs can add experience if they have dealt with banks, lawyers, vc's, operations, hiring etc in the past. These less glamorous tasks can often be the difference between success and failure. don't write off older entrepreneurs just yet!
Is there any data available on the numbers of people starting companies in each age group? Perhaps older people really are less likely to try it, which would explain why there might be fewer successful startups founded by older people. Without that number (startups by age), it is impossible to deduce the likelihood of success by age just from the number of successful startups by age.

Without seeing such numbers, it seems plausible to me that there would be less older founders for reasons that have been cited before on YC. People with families are simply less likely to take the risk.
'... The mistakes novices make come from a lack of experience (kids) ... they make this kind of mistake a thousand times before they learn better. But the experts (grown-ups) make the opposite mistake, so that when a real once-in-a-lifetime change comes along, they are at risk of regarding it as a fad. As a result of this asymmetry, the novice (kids) makes their one good call during an actual revolution, at exactly the same time the expert (grown-up) makes their one big mistake, but at that moment, that`s all that is needed to give the newcomer a considerable edge. ...'

Interesting. You can see this direct observation with the actions of any child who randomly practice and play with things they encounter to create or do something new. Older, wiser people with years of experience are either bored and see no advantage in play so they don't. Only to realise later that they should have tried this earlier. Is this a natural adaption process that adults outgrow? Is this process a non-optomised way for chance discovery and improvement?

There is also a dark side. Experts are experts for a reason, conservative competence. You don't want your accountant or lawyer advising you on something using trial and error techniques. The lack of experience in some skill-sets will also cause startups to fail ( #14, Poor investor management ~ http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html ). Successful entrepreneurs need to harness playfulness and hope their lack of experience doesn't cause them to fail. Serial entrepreneurs turn the playfulness on or off when required or find alternative strategies to plug areas they don't their inexperience into failure.

Maybe thats why a few grey heads are sometimes an advantage in guiding startups?
I agree that D is a better and cleaner language than C++, but in what way is C idiosyncratic?
C#.
screw u mike arrington ;)
Lisp is not at all exclusively functional. The best Lisp is, but you can easily write iterative code in Lisp as well. It's just that most Lisp programmers don't because they realize that the functional paradigm is usually superior in terms of creating clean, simple code that is easy to understand later.
That might be true of "almost every _real_" desktop application, although on my Linux install, I have a healthy amount of Python and Perl programs. As for quickly prototyped web applications, I think that Lisp, Python, Perl, and Ruby far outnumber Java and C/C++ (with Java far outnumbering C/C++).
Especially if you want to do any non-Windows programming.
I agree with the point about C. Most of my class assignments have to be programmed in C/C++ or Java. Out of those three, I usually end up choosing C, because it is not nearly as weighed down with syntax soup as Java and C++ are. So I don't really think of C as being idiosyncratic, either. It is somewhat close to the hardware, and I can't really think of much of anything that is in there without good reason.
Very poor logic. Logic doesn't prevail at Y-Combinator.
That Ben Casnocha kid really thinks a lot of himself.
One of the founders of a startup I once worked for, took great pride in naming his startup using a euphemism for his todger (Monty Python, meaning of life, Part VI: The Autumn Years, 'not the Noel Coward Song' http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/isntitaw.htm )

Now as a private company this was fine. But I imagine there was lots of chuckling going on explaining this question to the VC's and companies who eventually invested. The biggest laugh came as the company eventually went public and was sold out to a rather conservative consulting company. Took a while till the name was dropped.
They're hoping to be bought out?
Perhaps all the spinning images of browsers that take several seconds to load Twitter generate energy which is then sold.
Great point. I wrote up a whole post about this "John Chow CPM anomaly" over at:
http://onwebapps.com/how-to-profit-from-alexa-arbitrage/

Basic summary: if you can start a blog/site geared towards users who probably have the Alexa toolbar / Firefox SearchStatus Plugin installed, you can reap much higher CPMs.
Why did I get downvoted? Because of the the missing 'you' between 'do' and 'pronounce'?
Don't Finance Anyone Over 27 - New York Times
Very interesting. After all these difficulties, what attracted you to biotech so much? I'm really curious. Is it primarily an intellectual/scientific curiosity or a desire to help people or the business aspect of it or...?
That's exactly what I'm curious about. What is necessary and how much capital is needed.
Unicorn tails.

As a serious answer; Lots of web-based revenue sources are volume based. The more they grow the more they can make. In advertising this is somewhat exponential - the more popular your service, the larger CPM (cost per thousand page views) advertisers are willing to pay (all other things being equal & to a point).

As such, if you don't need a revenue source when you start, it makes sense to build your business first and add revenue later. You could make more in your first month of revenue than all other previous months combined. Twitter could easily add some combination of advertising, premium accounts or premium customisations at any point.

However, whether that's good in practice or not is another matter...
Woz magic of electronics and computers
All my contexts are belong to Maker Faire
CNET News.com - Technology news
Data mining goes mainstream
I'm in biotech because I see a rare opportunity to bring a company to revenue on $10,000. All I have to worry about is being sued.

It also gives me a pathway to this:
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=13464
If they get there first how are they stealing?
FanLib - How not to launch a startup
A few other articles on the subject have also appeared lately:

http://community.livejournal.com/fandom_lawyers/34651.html?mode=reply

http://community.livejournal.com/metafandom/
http://evhead.com/2006/10/birth-of-obvious-corp_25.asp

Until today it's funded by Evan Williams who bought Twitter and Odeo from it's previous investor last year.
Plentyoffish.com - One server
Companies try eBay to sell themselves
Newspapers, TV and the Net - It's convergence time
PG talks a lot about this kind of thing in his essays (and book). (Zemaj's answer is pretty good, too.)

There are two models I can imagine for Twitter: 1) working in advertising, or 2) become a feature of some larger business.

You might also speculate that there would be some permutation of Twitter that would be interesting enough to become Twitter Pro or somesuch. But those kind of things are not often very exciting.
Actually, dude managed to sell Odeo for a good chunk of money! Kind of impressive; I didn't hold out much hope for him.
Try http://grabagooddomain.com.
Is Bebo Worth $1 billion?
He sold odeo for $1M after buying it back from his investors for $5M.
I think IIS sucks in almost every way, but no one can say it's slow or inefficient. What he's proving is how far you can scale up vertically these days. It's worth noting that his 8-core machine is equivalent in power to quite a few dual PIII 1.3Ghz machines, which was the standard configuration not too long ago.

Scribd is a good Linux example, where they're doing quite a bit of traffic with a single 4-core web server. Although with Rails/Mongrel they'll never be anywhere near as efficient.

Markus isn't very forthcoming in mentioning that he has some monster SQL Server machines with a 60 drive 15k RPM SAN. That's doing most of the heavy lifting on his site, and is some expensive gear. His web application is an especially thin front-end to his database.

He also has 3 web servers handling his IM stuff.

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/07/scaling-sql-server-2005-national-tv-usa-canada/
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/01/8-way-dual-core-opterons-with-128gbram/
Angels clip wings of entrepreneurs
Has anyone else noticed this trend?
Feedback from rec.models.rc.air on my idea for remote flying of model planes (using justin.tv tech?)
I didn't expect such a negative reaction, but some of the feedback is quite good anyway.
True, C does not suffer too much from idiosyncrasies, more from being poorly designed in comparison to modern programming languages.
:: I made up the name.

:: It's one word

:: People here it and wonder what it is - drives them a bit crazy and they just have to find out (or so we always hope)

:: It's easy to say, sounds friendly

:: Easy to spell

:: Timeless/trend-less

Those are the basic tools we used. From there it was a lot of laughter and fun. :)
Currently, they have none. They have lots of expenses though. One of the biggest is the SMS fees... they pay for receiving and sending them. I heard an interview with Evan in which he said that the fees are in 5 figures per month!

How would they make money in the long run? Sell pro tools and statistics... similar to the way Feedburner makes money. Just study Feedburner and you'll see plenty of parallels.
So...Google admits they've been watching you!
The idea is interesting.

However, I think an activity such as flying a model airplane is something that people want to experience first hand, as in right there with the remote control in their hands, and watching the plane physically maneuver.

Also, issues with gauging airspace and having a full 360 view of your surroundings via the internet will be extremely, difficult, in my opinion, if the camera were to be mounted on the model aircraft. There are lots of liabilities.

Personally, flying a model airplane via the internet isn't something I'd look forward to doing. It just doesn't come close to the real thing.

I hope that's not discouraging.

That's just like, my opinion, man.
Haha! I think auctomatic could be moderately great! It will depend on the execution.
First RoR application someone should write with this is YouTubeCat for easily watching a large series of YouTube videos ;-)
You have to hand it to him for being so honorable. I think he knew there wasn't a good chance he'd make that money back, but he didn't want to screw his investors. Evan Williams is a model entrepreneur.
They aren't competing against eBay.
Bad Powerpoint Humor [video]
If you generate enough SMS messages through an official SMS portal, they begin to start paying YOU by the message, because they are making so much in SMS charges.
'near pittsburgh' doesn't work. I like the idea, though.
Just write down a bunch, A BUNCH, of words that relate to the purpose of your site, the effects you want it to have on society, etc. and just sift through them. Try and combine them, but keep it short.
Who Will Buy Facebook? (and why TC thinks Google is a possibility)
Why have invite codes at all? Just let people in the site.
I don't think an IPO is too big of a stretch for the Facebook people.
I pretty much based the name of my company based on what domain names were available. I wanted it to be short, catchy, and easy to remember. I'm not the most creative person, so I asked some friends for suggestions. In the end, it was my friend who came up with the name (mygrub.net)
Google licenses robotic car to map cities! What?
Do all the mega-buyouts lately mean good things for new startups, or does it mean that all the potential acquirers have already spent too much money?
I like nonsensical names because descriptive names tend to sound extremely boring and can limit you. With time anything you choose will come to feel familiar.

One method I like to start with is using foreign words written in latin alphabet. Japanese works great.

Here's a good site with vocabulary lists: http://www.learn-japanese.info/indexv.html
Same thing can be said for Ruby and Perl
The $85 computer
Google buying Feedburner for about 100 mil
The signals the beginning of the end for desktop applications. We already knew it was coming eventually. Of course, for some apps more powerful desktops will be necessary, but for the majority of people internet access will provide them with all they need. I see google buying one of these startups , brand it a google internet machine sell it for dirt cheap.
They will IPO. TC and their false speculations are really getting old.
No, although it's rather difficult to spot national economic trends just through qualitative observations. :-)
And as the article points out he's using Akamai to cache the images.
But it's mainly countries you'd expect:

"China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia"
What if facebook got their full $6 billion price? It'd be one big buy for Google but it's not like Google is going broke.
At the rate buyouts are increasing, let's put it at a nice round $60B.
For me, about $6,000 in equipment and reagents, office space that can be converted into a basic lab, and a whole lot of lawyers. I'm going into a biotech area (genetic testing) with almost no regulation or governmental oversight, which changes the game just a little.
Yes, dump her and get another cofounder. If they just want to invest something, they're an early investor.
On the contrary, C is excellently designed for its intended purpose: as a language for writing UNIX. If that's what you're doing, C is the ideal choice. If you're using it for something else, you're misusing it.
Should you replace the loss of the single most vital resource you have as a startup? I think so. Unless you've got the energy and motivation to make up for it yourself.