skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No problem! Focus on creating value, not on maintaining an ordering system. It's time consuming enough to do #1. (Easier said than done.)

Plus, if you become really big--and saving 50 cents in processing fees per order will start to add up--the other shopping cart / payment processors will be knocking at your door, writing their own API for you, and giving you better deals. Or, if the problem is that they don't have enough features for you right now, just e-mail them your suggestions. By the time you go live, they will probably have a lot of the features you requested. Again, I don't know anything about any shopping cart.

If you spend time on the more difficult and complicated method when there is no urgency for it right now, when you know there's a faster and easier method available that lets you go back to working on the main product, you will just HATE your entire project.

Instead, take the easier/faster option, as you will be able to go back to working on the actual product or service sooner, so there will be less boredom. When the situation actually arises that it DOES matter which shopping cart you have, the urgency of the need will motivate you to make the switch, and you will be excited about succeeding. On the other hand, if you take the harder method right now, you will not be excited--at the end of it all, you will be angry it has taken so much time when there was an easier method. Plus, 3-6 months from now, you'll probably have to modify the ordering system no matter which shopping cart you started with. Or, what if you decide to stay in beta for the next year (not accepting any payments)?

As you can see, I've made that mistake before... This is a motivational speech for me as much as it is for you. ;)
Hey Drew,

Congrats on a great product. A linux port would be great for servers - I'm always rsyncing stuff between my linux boxes.

For those who don't have shell access though, it would be cool if you integrated the service with (S)FTP. I don't even think you'd need to sync to the server.

Just giving the user the ability push his/her dropbox public folder to a server using (S)FTP would give your software several new use cases.
Their logo could only be more obnoxious if it said "REPLY!!1" instead of just "Reply!".

Where's the YC startup that solves the logo/slogan problem with some clever hack? They're both such a pain and every company goes through creating them.
yup; i'd be happy to talk offline about it; shoot me an email at drew@getdropbox.com .
Some objects on the page weren't loading for me, Google cache helped:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://bnoopy.typepad.com/bnoopy/2004/09/hiring_sabermet.html&hl=en&sa=G&strip=1
Comments have down arrows. They're only visible if you're logged in.
And on a shared hosting account you can host unlimited domains. I won't name them, but on company with the word "host" in it's name spelled out in the T & C that each account is limited to 30,000 individual files. If each site only had one page/file how could I host an unlimited number of domains?

Anyone have the number for the FTC?
What does summer mean for you (dates)? This sounds like a cool plan, I wouldn't mind hitting the US for a few months to work on some stuff...
>>I think this "web database" concept is suicidal.

Not if they get some clients using it (and paying each month) instead of developing their own reports.
We're gonna keep on, keep on, keep on moving,

We're gonna keep on, keep on, keep on grooving.

Keep on singing and dancing all through the night.
Oops, if only there were a "this looks like another article" warning button. "Are you sure you want to spam our readers?"
I overheard STEW allowed users to vote others down before I ever registered for this site. :)

(STEW = YCombinator startup news.)
It doesn't matter?! The score you get for playing the internet is my favorite contribution of reddit to social site design. Things just haven't been as much fun ever since slashdot got rid of numerical karma scores.
How about STEW as an acronym for Y Combinator Startup News?
There would be almost nothing in common with your non-FB "toolkit" and the FB one. Theirs is a way to access the FB database, yours wouldn't be.

Hopefully you're not imagining that FB for some reason decided to give away the tools that would be needed to create another FB. That's not what they mean by "toolkit".
How about STEW ? STartup nEWs. It sounds delicious, it's easy to type, and it's easy to say! Toss in one gradient somewhere, and we're all set!

Or STEWY, to get the Y in there?

Plus, it's from a place called Y Combinator, and a STEW combines many ingredients...

"I read about it on Stew last night." "Was it good?" "Yes."
my writing led to confusion and thus was not "good content." but ah, you know, good content. you know? :)

notice that dfranke just proofread my post.
I don't know if he applied; he has tried before and was rejected. Way to represent the lone rangers!
Perhaps you also need a certain amount of karma. I'm logged in (with 2 karma) and don't see any down arrows.
Backup Plan is to self-bootstrap and try to run it ourselves. But still optimistic that there may be a chance to get selected.
Paul,

I hope that despite the competition you will still be able to discuss some trends in the applications you get -- as much as YC is a serious business now, I suspect it's been an interesting sociological experiment for some people.

Regarding the larger number of groups you might accept, I can't help but wonder how YC will scale in the near future. You recently said that the number of unsuccessful startups in the first batch was very low, and it seems that you are getting an extremely self-selected pool of applicants to start with. If you can manage funding more people at once (I suspect time is the bottleneck), I'd venture a guess that you'll keep a 'success' rate way above the standard VC level.

And if you get to work with a few groups from overseas, I'd be keen to learn if you noticed any (cultural?) differences in their approach, or whether hackers are just hackers, regardless of their location...
I did a startup and recently got acquired. Here's what I did.

I say get disaster health insurance (30 bucks a month) screw cobra. its too expensive.

if you're in MA, i hear you can get universal health care and suck on the teat of the taxpayer. If you're in CA, Blue shield is cheap. If you want bang for the buck, I suggest Kaiser.

Also helped that my girlfriend is about to become a surgeon so she and her friends had me pretty much covered for normal stuff.
YCFix: Greasemonkey script to remove upmodded YC News links
honestly it sucks.

specifically, the programming (types of shows available) sucks.

A big mistake they've made so far is to not open it up to whoever wants to broadcast. The resulting content is third-rate. They need to open it up to anyone who wants to stream content to make things interesting.
We're already bootstrapping a few different ideas/products - so we'll keep on that path. Our reason for applying to YC was not for the funding, but more for the mentors, networking and for the chance to be surrounded by more young like-minded individuals; there's not much of that in Cleveland.

I like the idea of getting some space in Boston/SF and bootstrapping it with others - I'd be open to renting out a house with some fellow entrepreneurs for the summer and seeing what we can cook up.
PG,

What would be cool is if we could access the Application Page still and possibly see a status of the Applications (eg. Unread, Read, Reviewed, Rejected, Considered, etc) - and if Rejected, maybe a 1-2 liner from the YC Team.

It would take a little bit more time on YC's part, but from past experiences, the more communication that can be had between the entrepreneur and VC, the better - even on failed pitches there is something to be learned.
I didn't look, I didn't notice, and frankly, I didn't care. If I had ever wanted to upvote a comment, I'm sure I would have found quickly.
I like news.yc
This is a great site, and I think the more people are aware of the situation with Venture Capital, the more they realize that the real cost of it is not in loss of ownership of the company, but in increased liklihood that your company will fail.

Plus, these days, unless you're buidling a manufacturing plant for a medical device or integrated circuit, there is no reason to raise $1M.

Build it for $100k-$400k with angel funds and if its worth a damn, you'll be able to monetize it and grow.

You don't need superbowl commercials ot get your app out there anymore... you need a blog. You don't need to go into expensive deals with portal players-- you just need to show up at carefully targetted conferences. (Twitters performance at SXSW is a great example of this.)
Did you try searching?
http://wiki.startupschool.org/doku.php
You know, I really think we should organise something like this. Rent a reasonably large place for 3 months, we just get together and work in a shared environment, then move on. It would be great just so one can get ideas bounced off other technical people, and get some feedback.

Of course, it could also turn out real bad, cos the one guy gets funding, and the others don't so everyone is hating on him. And then then the two guys who are at the house and discover that they are working on exactly the same ajax online calender.

Or what about the guy who came in and was working on a tool to catalogue your finger nail clippings, and this suddenly changes to a remote folder sync tool as soon as this other guy demos his own great folder sync tool.

And to top it off, you film this whole thing, Justin.tv style! It'll be great.
I say it's suicidal because they're trying to create a completely new market for something called "web databases". Kraus talks about the virtues of riding waves rather than trying to create them, and I think DabbleDB could really utilize that advice right now.

The way they position themselves will influence the way the press covers them and customers view them. It might be the difference between mediocre and meteoric sales.
Isn't that some amazing nerve? The Rick is offering the founder shares in his own company as compensation for not taking a salary!

The inherent assumption behind this asinine perspective is that "Preferred" shares are for VCs only... but the reality is that VCs offer nothing to warrant such preferences. Everyone who has put sweat equity into the company is just as much an investor, and is generally taking on more risk... but the VC expects to be given preferences because such terms are common, and they are common because too many startups cave because they are addicted to the cash.

Love that the liquidation preference is "only" 1X. The reality is that it is screwing over all the other investors in the company by saying that the VC goes to the front of the line, gets all their money back, and then gets the percentage of anything left over comensurate with their percentage ownership of the company. The implication being that employees have not actually invested in the company and if there's anything left over, then the employees and founders get some.

This is particularly insulting given that the liklihood of this preference being relevant is increased by taking VC money-- which in this day and age means forgoing almost certain profitability for a higher risk shot at hitting it out of the ballpark.

And the price for putting a bomb under your company and lighting the fuse? They get to be first in line when it explodes and the company is liquidated for much less than it would have gotten if it was a viable business.

An employee that puts in $100k worth of labor a year for five years and gets $50k in salary has invested $250k just as much as an investor who puts in $250k in cash.

The arrogance of preferences boggles the mind.

Nobody in YC should be looking for this kind of investment. Stick with angels. Give everyone common- recognize that investors who are only putting in money are fairly compensated by getting shares at a fair valuation. If they want liduidation preferences, they should pay for it- and thus be investing at a multiple of the valuation that common gets.

VC funding was made obsolete in 2000. You no longer need to have that kind of a burn rate.
"If each site only had one page/file how could I host an unlimited number of domains?"

You could generate them dynamically.
Is reply the right word in here? Request or Seek may have been appropriate. So they are confused at level 1. Just a curious thought as to why so many companies get funded just like that but realy valuable type ones struggle to get noticed.
I'm sure SF is a great social scene... but this seems cash inefficient.

For $2600 you could rent 2.6 houses in the Seattle area... and seattle ain't exactly cheap. Or put another way, you get a nice 2BR house to live in with a yard, and you get a 3BR house to use as the office.... all for the rent of an apartment in SF?
Ah wouldn't that be one heck of a service:)

I spent an entire month past summer just trying to get the logo right for one of my earlier startup. It was a lot of fun though: I went to the art districts around Bombay and hired half a dozen street artists(from beggars to alcoholics) to make the same sketch followed by a gazillion revisions. The end product was truly worth it - if only it could be done by a logo design start-up, lol.

-Zaid
What is good PowerPoint design?
Research points the finger at PowerPoint
The whole site design screams:
"HOME AND AUTO INFO FOR YOUR TODDLER!!!"
I feel the title is too much of a pun, than a good indicator of what the story is about. But has some nice tips about how to use and compose a visual presentation.
We already have some practice scaling. The first batch was 8 startups, and the most recent 13. I think we could get to 20 or even 30 without changing the model substantially. Beyond that we might have to hire people, or get alumni to help.

So far, foreign founders seem a bit more serious. Makes sense, because merely coming to the US is a big step for them.
Yes, but the videos are not there; only the audio recordings are.
That's what we call it internally.
I think the larger issue is about getting user adoption. It is actually great case to have a situation where users overwhelm your service in a way that it outgrows a system such as this. If he ever gets that large, obviously there will be plenty of people looking to help him figure out how to make the storage portion feasible.

More interesting is the user experience. Creating something users can enjoy, agree with, and possibly part money for is a much more difficult problem to solve than figuring out to make large scale storage cost effective.
Great job guys, hope to see you get picked up in the next session. Keep me posted for the mac version.
Viaweb/Paul Graham's First Business Plan
Kinds of hacking involved in startups
So, as discussed elsewhere, I'm not immediately planning on starting a startup, but I am in favor of the idea in theory. One thing that bugs me about it, however, is that one of the advertisements in favor of starting it is that you can get real, serious, no-kidding hacking done, in at least a quarter of your time, while you aren't running frantic errands.

That sounds pretty good to me. However, all the hacking I hear about in relation to startups is either a) UI design (e.g. Wufoo) or b) server scaling. Server scaling is about as boring and unhappy to me as you could get without mandating that it be in Java; UI design is better, but still not appealing.

There are obviously exceptions; search engines come to mind. But overall, the average successful startup seems heavy on nasty little problems and light on big, hard problems. Is this perception correct? Anecdotes for or against?
This is great.

Where did the funding for Viaweb come from and did this plan help you get it?
I used zillow extensively while looking for my current home. This site sucks in comparison: it's a cheap knockoff without the brand recognition.
Counterexample: Reddit was initially written in Lisp, and then rewritten in Python. For technical reasons.
The linked computers can be used for a kind of distributed storage system (like GFS). Say each user shares an amount of storage resources and can use a specific amount of storage of the system. If the users are willing to accept such a deal, you can reduce the cost of your own storage resources. A major problem of course is the reliability of the system.
It brings back to mind pg's question: is multi-threading ever going to be abstracted out, and dealt with in the language implementation? I hope so.

BTW, does anyone know of a startup using Haskell or Erlang?
Hopefully the videos will be out soon. I'll add them to this feed when they are. In the meantime, here's the podcast feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ycombinator-StartupSchool

Note that currently the 2007 talks are from my lower quality recordings, but I'll add the official ones when they come out.
Same here. Bootstrapping and self-funded at the moment. We're hoping to be selected for YC for the same reasons you mentioned. Seriously, it would just be an amazingly fun and educational experience to associate with like-minded hackers at the top of their game.
From what I've read, they got their first seed capital from an angel investor and friend Julian Weber, of about $15,000. He also happened to be a lawyer, so legal counsel was very accessible, if not free. This is somewhere in Paul's essays. Google around and you'll find more.
How about a cheaper but still decent place to keep the costs down? I don't know about Boston but SF is hideously expensive.
I couldn't agree more. Merely providing a new interaction and distribution framework isn't enough to revolutionize television. I'm not convinced on 100% user-submitted content, but Joost's current reliance on the big TV networks and production bigwigs for content is -- and has proven to be -- problematic.

I still give Joost a lot of credit for their work, but their solution, like TiVo, YouTube, and, to a certain extent, Netflix is only an evolutionary step in the bigger picture.

For now.
As a 32 year old owner of 2 failed and one successful startup, I can say without hesitation that this is by far the most insightful piece I've read on the topic. It was not just an essay, for me this was a trip down memory lane. Thanks to the author for a very insightful and enjoyable piece of literature, I hope to see this selected as its been submitted to Slashdot.
I moved from Baltimore to Manila so that I could afford to pay my medical expenses in cash. By coming here, I've amplified my purchasing power ^2 and live more comfortably paying less. The birth of my daughter with complications and a c-section was just under $5000.00 USD, in a state of the art facility that rivals Hopkins itself (Google, "The Medical City Pasig City" to see it). A pediatric appointment costs me $10, medicine even less. I know my move was a little drastic, but it opened many doors. :)
A service that crawls a given URL and reports spelling or grammar mistakes would be relatively easy. The 'lynx' and 'spell' utilities inherent in most Linux distributions would suffice for the basics.

I think the service would be better marketed as a last line of defense against linguistic embarrasment. If the 'service' found a typo, punctuation (that would be a little harder) or grammar error on a given URL it could simply e-mail a designated contact, show the error in context and suggestions to correct it.

This would be useful only in situations where ajax based "as you type" correction (or more traditional regex post-posting) is not possible, or if a site blindly imported harvested content from other sources without human checking for such errors.

Given the ease of which this could be developed, I say .. go for it.
I love the very last line:

"Spending some money on advertising might also be a good idea."
Interesting take on the investment process by a YC'er
'... 2007 talks are from my lower quality recordings ...'

though some of the comments, additions, cues over the talks are pretty funny
As either Alexis or Aaron of reddit said "it's just a website, it's just a list of links."

In building our startup I haven't come across any monumental, super mathematically/computer science involved problems, but it's still been extremely challenging and fun. I'd say the challenge/fun comes more from trying to do all the things you listed at once, instead of any one of them singularly.

If nothing else, CSS and IE will teach you patience.
Go hang out on http://programming.reddit.com and I'm sure there are a bunch.
I love the paragraph stating the upcoming introduction of Java into Netscape will help the server generate the stores on a user's screen. Every programmer who've seen it, including Paul, must have laughed at that line later on. "Client-side Java taking load off the server? That's silly!" I believe Paul himself has said, in one of his other articles, that some startups failed during the dot com boom simply because they tried to create their businesses using Java.

That is, until last year. With the JavaScript (AJAX) technology saving CPU server cycles[1] by doing a lot of logic in the web browser itself, Paul's one paragraph predicting something he expected to occur within a few months now sounds way ahead of its time. Either that, or such technology has taken 10 years too long to brew. (Coffee reference!)

I would also like to read the business plans of crazy dot com companies which tanked immediately. It would be great to be able to contrast the two. I'm thinking those business plans probably used a lot of made-up words to confuse the investors. Paul's document is pretty succinct.

[1] as well as saving bandwidth and time, of course.
Extreme Dot Com Survival Videos - 5 mins each x 13 founders
Background: Sorry for the intrepid title, but Extreme Survival Stories is the actual name of the session! There are video links on the bottom of that page. I think this guy I link to first would make a great Startup School speaker.

Companies: Orbitz, Vibes, NVU, SurePayroll, PeopleFlow, WrestlingGear.com, InfoRamp, Peapod, and others

Location: Chicago, 2004
I don't think that a central authority is necessary for money to work, at least not in form of a monopolist. Actually the current systems are rather unsatisfying because a state can loose its credibility and thus the trust in its curreny quite fast, basically as soon as war looms on the horizon or it becomes apparent that it will default on its debt. In the last 25 years over 87 currencies crashed.
And because of the monopoly of the state on money the whole economy is usually going down along. For my part I would therefore abandon the monetary monopoly of the state and allow competition, allow companies to issue money. When they connect their name to the currency and have no legal power to make their money legal tender they will have a much stronger incentive to provide a good and stable money. Hayek wrote a fascinating treatise on the denationalisation of money, and with the ongoing globalisation sooner or later we will get used to juggle with more than one currency in our pockets. Second Life seems to be a step in the direction that companies start to issue private currencies and when states, especially in the developing countries, will fail to keep their currency stable chances are that they will be replaced by private currencies.

Equally interesting and probably easier to believe are gold backed currencies with competing private institutes issuing goldbacked money.

Still, its great to see people thinking about money in another way than just how to get it.