skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Local subdomains, or groups, a-la craigslist. E.g. toronto.ycombinator.com, or somesuch.

I understand YCombinator's rationale for having founders move to Boston, or the Valley.

That said, it might be great for you guys to get local footholds, where people can meet, organize, find co-founders, etc., before deciding to seek YC funding.
Nice job jamie :) Great interface. Have you thought about allowing users to upload their own puzzles & share them w/ friends?

Maybe you can create some sort of javascript widget that users load into their myspace profiles / websites??
Who's In Toronto, Canada?
I live in Miami, but may move to Toronto. was just there last week. The volvo-sized chunks of ice falling from CN Tower really endeared me. :)
So, who's in TO? Anyone want to chat, or meet (at a pub, say)?

Going to the original startup school, and watching the YC dinner on Justin.TV has re-inforced how important it is to have a local support network. Even if you're not working on the same stuff, there's an energy that's motivating and focusing.

Whether you're planning to apply to YC, planning to start something locally, or already on the way, let's meet and share the energy.

You can contact me at spameatinggrin at gmail dot com.
Hehe. The snow in my back yard's almost completely melted. Looks like the raccoons and cats left me some "presents". Mmm.
I will pull a Zuckerberg and turn down 2 billion
I don't agree that 'ugly' is what popular sites are trying to do. I just think that it's poor designers. I won't even bother with a site that looks like it was made in the 90s. With a better designed site I have a better chance of going back and using their service.

In my opinion you only have around 10 seconds to make an impression on me with your website. If I see an ugly site I won't even bother looking any further. I'll just click the back button and never go back to your site again.
But right now there's no pretense of journalistic objectivity. Arrington plugs his investments whenever it is appropriate now.

I don't see Techcrunch becoming an irrelevant source of startup news just because they have more of their own investments to plug. The bottom line is that Arrington does not need to be objective to remain a good source of news, he just needs to continue doing what he does.
Popular sites are not trying to be ugly -- they are trying to be popular. Look at it this way: Myspace has $600 million dollars. If aesthetics were a competitive advantage with the /average/ (i.e. not a web professional) user, surely they'd spend some of that hiring Eric Meyers, don't you think?
You've just listed everything you want out of the future (financially), which is a different question. Remember, this is for a 3 month investment of time.

So, it's good that you know what you want, but if someone offered to take you halfway there, would you turn it down? What about one tenth of the way?

Remember, most businessess fail. Yes, that includes yours, and some of mine. :)
I think their opportunity is to use their access to "deep" works to make a site that is really suited for that kind of video.

YouTube, even the modern web, is all about shallow content - something that grabs your attention for a few minutes. Popular sites are like tapas bars. It remains to be seen what a site with more depth to its offerings can really accomplish. Something more like a sit-down restaurant.

We know they have compelling stuff to show us -- people already spend lots of time discussing and communicating about it online and off. But they have to build an environment suited to that kind of entertainment.

It's an exciting problem in many ways, but it involves changing peoples' behavior and expectations, which is, um, very hard.
If a VC can choose to value a company at $15m, shouldn't a tech savvy acquirer be willing to pay that much instead of waiting another 2 years when the same technology might cost $75m?
As a follow-up question, I think a nice addition for the application would be: "Aside from what you are currently making, what is driving you to be an entrepreneur?"

Paul, you mentioned that one of the key characteristics of a good team is persistence and the unwillingness to give up. When you have no fall-back and absolutely must succeed, it can be the difference between success and failure. YC can infer a lot from the rest of the application, but it might be beneficial for both parties if we were explicit about it.
Give it a rest, Casey Kasem. Just list them in numerical order.
Yup, I can't imagine true startups having specified work hours at all. A company in its startup stage isn't run like a corporation and that's why it's able to be more productive.
Chad Perrin: Apollo 1.0 -- not exactly the moon
Google: Fewer Ads, More Money
"In the old days,"

No. In the old days, home equipment had one track, and studio equipment had one track. Sgt. Pepper was recorded on a 4-track--what distinquished them were the things that you just can't get in your garage: Studio-quality accoustics, a vast array of equipment, world-class instruments and studio musicians, producers, arrangers, etc.

Yeah, if you want to be the next White Stripes, okay, maybe you can pull it off. But then you aren't dealing with "great albums" by any measure.

Sorry about all this; it just bugs me when people think things come cheap when they don't.
Similar to how in, say, supermarkets where the number of brands of a product on the shelves may show a negative relationship with the number of sales.

Offer customers too many choices and they will become overwhelmed and not choose anything.
Crowdsourcing: a million heads is better than one
How sure are you that the relevant quality of the successful ad shown in the link isn't downmarketness but that it's eyecatching? As the author says, the 'upmarket' one is harmonious - which is a really bad quality in an ad. The damn thing needs to grab you! If you can do that and maintain an upmarket, snooty feel, then you have a big win when selling such beauty products. Probably most things, too.

Let's hear about your experiences.
I'm so glad I'm going to be at startup school this weekend.
Yeah I see your point. But having an ugly site isn't going to help you gain popularity.

I agree Myspace is probably not thinking of the design aspects. They're focusing on expanding their product and adding features. But when I look at Virb I think "Wow, this is what Myspace should look like". If Virb becomes a big competitor I guarantee that Myspace will be changing their design very quickly and calling up Eric Meyers.
News.YC first month traffic
When I write articles, I try to minimize the number of ads in them in order to have better control over where the user clicks. If, for instance, a user clicks on an ad selling "knifes", he or she is unlikely to revisit the website and click on another ad or link on the website. With each successive ad, the control over where the user clicks becomes more chaotic.

The basic premise is the same as the one mentioned in Biz 2.0 magazine: If there are no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it. If there are too many ads on your site, nobody is going to click on them.

Daniel, thank you for posting this since before reading it, I did not have any factual data to back my claim :)
new data on this partnership from arrington's notes from the conference call:

"Zucker is now on. Talking about importance of significant IP protection as a primary goal."

Doomed.
Why the sharp jump in traffic in the middle of last week?
If this were to be charted, I'd bet that it'd look something like the Laffer curve
^ Oh you can blame me for that. I should probably logout once in a while :D
I live about 15 mins away from Pearson Airport, Toronto. Just curious, what do you think about the startup environment in Toronto? Where is all the action at?
[aristus, lost my passwd :)]

"Eyecatching" means garish, cluttered, etc. This is not always desirable. Usually it's reserved for wide-spectrum ads for cheap items, hence "downmarket". Audience drives design. If your audience is a few thousand rich wives you'll take the elegant route. If your audience is a million working girls your best response comes from more strident stuff. Since there are so many more working girls versus rich wives, it seems as if all DM is "downmarket". I am sure of this because I've seen the difference even a few changes can make, and I've seen years and years of real-world research on how different styles gather response for different things.

Let's say I'm doing an ad for big copiers. Artsy doesn't work here. You need strong, reassuring. Price isn't listed. Instead you want a couple of pictures, big (local!) phone number, local address, and an IBM-ish logo. IKON, formerly Alco, wanted to establish a trust brand that buyers don't have to think too hard about. So: IKON came out of "I Know One Name".

Now you are selling pizza. Number, types of food, price, delivery options, hours of operation. Closeups of bubbling cheese. Sizzle, not steak.

Cut to the iPhone. Popular yet hip. It's a fine line, and very few orgs can manage it. That's why Apple is the darling of the ad world. They are an outlier.

Another great fine-liner was Grey Poupon mustard. They took the visual cues of the rich, the exclusiveness, the clubby feel un-rich people imagine exists ("But of course!") and placed it right in front of the fact they were flogging mustard for 4 bucks a jar. But once that hook was in and the audience was ok with funny crunchy brown stuff, other fancy mustards went right back to the more familiar downmarket themes of "fun for kids" and "kick it up a notch".

...and so on. Non-commercial (and, frankly, inexperienced) artists tend to make the mistake that ads are not thought about too much or are made by folk who lack taste. Sure, 90% of every profession is crap, but the aim of commercial art is different from Art.
I have no idea. Usually midweek will be highest for a site like this, but that was an unusually large spike.
Y-Combinator-company heysan! looking for software developer. Meet us at startup school!
Broad appeal and psychological acceptance seems to have a direct relationship with poor design, doesn't it? It's one of those things that make you ponder.

It's undeniable that Virb is more beautiful than MySpace. But it seems to me that superior design has that subtle hint of self-importance that becomes a tougher sell over a modest offering.

(edit): Oops, didn't see this before: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5760

Looks like I pretty much just said what Paul did in his comment.
YouTube: From Concept to Hyper-growth, a presentation by YouTube cofounder
Thanks for this article, ulfstein. One thing I'm on the edge about is flattening the crowd so that no one person or group of people have more of an influence. Although every opinion should matter equally there is always those people that know more about a topic. Those people should have more of an influence in the overall market. Good read though!
It took 11 Apollo missions to get to the moon!
So tell me, how awesome is it to be at a point where you're able to recruit developers to join your team? Exciting times, gustaf, exciting times.
Social networks, such as MySpace and Friendster, outsource graphic designing to the users by letting them alter the source code. A user who spends two hours customizing their profile is likely to become more loyal than he or she would've been two hours earlier.

Of course, the side effect is that the site turns out to be chaotic; though, it does leave the user with a more personalized experience. Humans have a tendency to prefer choice when given the freedom to do so. And as it turns out, they are not very good at it.
awesome! Thank you so much Zaid.
I would've expected the traffic to be low around the 16th:

http://technorati.com/chart/Y+Combinator?chartdays=30&language=n&authority=n
It's pretty awesome! :)

--------------------------------------------------------

heysan! is a Y-combinator (ycombinator.com) funded startup creating the next generation of mobile instant messaging services.

We're looking for a smart and talented software developer to join our team. You are like us if your laptop is your lifeline and your passion is well written software.

You know Linux, Java, PHP and MySQL really well and understand why standards and open source matter.

Our team of 4 founders has a strong background in mobile/wireless. We're looking for someone who can join us full time in San Francisco and both salary and equity is negotiable in this round.

We're going to be at startup school at Stanford on Saturday and at the startup school reception on Friday night, want to meet up? Send us an Email, IM or text at:

gustaf@gmail.com, 646 266 9612 or marie.brattberg@gmail.com, 347 323 8922
Hmm... Create an arbitrary definition of superiority. Weed out everyone who doesn't meet said standard. Sounds a lot like high school.
Marketing web apps - some dubious advice from an SEO
I agree. I've not yet had a closer look a the sites mentioned but am wondering whether any of them might employ such a system.
These guys made the slideshow on http://ycombinator.com btw.
If TechCrunch were funding startups as well as reporting on them, no competitor or potential competitor of any startup they'd funded would feel comfortable talking to them. And since no one would know exactly who they were funding or about to fund, no one would feel safe telling them anything except already public information. That would eliminate the scoops that make TechCrunch what it is.
I think it depends on what you want to do. This is a great place for film / video. It's getting better for games, and of course there's financial services. There also seem to be a bunch of mobile companies here, too.

There's a very healthy ecology of small software companies, and a lot of web companies. There's a bit of defence and aerospace around the airport, but I think Montreal and Ottawa are bigger than Toronto, for that.

Kitchener's not too far away, and they're a major powerhouse with U of Waterloo, and RIM.

ATI just got acquired by AMD, and Alias by Autodesk, so there should be some newly minted angel investors around.
I haven't sought financing, so I don't know what that's like. Having been through some private-equity as an employee, the funding definitely seems to be out there.

I think we're building a pretty good tradition, but it's going to take time. The seeds are there though, looking back over the last 20 years (god, I'm getting old!). There's nothing like the unholy Stanford-VC-startup triad yet.

So, I'm not really sure what to say. It's probably harder to get funded here than in CA, and you obviously won't get the same buzz as being YC-funded. On the other hand, if you want to work at a startup or small, hip shop then there're lots of places here.

EDIT If I ever move out of my home-office, I'm going to try to set up next to the U of T comp sci and engineering buildings. That's the nice thing about a down-town campus.
Java, the evolutionary dead-end: "I've come to the conclusion that it's not really such a bad thing for Java to be."
One of the best books I have read lately.
You have to wonder if Reed Hasting has read http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html

It'd be awesome if we could find out.
To me the interesting sites are those the author would call ugly by design (i.e, not the ones that are ugly because there was no money to hire a designer, or because the programmer thought he was a designer.)

But with those, I think bueno misses the point: these sites represent the edge of design. They are designers trying to create something unique, trying to find a spark. When successful, it's usually a small crowd that "gets it": they're passionate about it while many, maybe even a majority, hate it. If it's truly good, eventually the majority gets converted. I'm in the majority with the Honda Element, for example: to my shock I'm beginning to come around.

Most edge design, though, IS ugly, will gain only hedging admiration from the designer's mother and averted gazes from his wife. But it's not intended to be bad, it's intended to be revolutionary.
Wow, I like the new look.
Why static typing? "the more things I can make the IDE ... do for me, the more my mind is able to concentrate on more important things"
"It sounds great, in theory, but would be hard to implement."

There's nothing difficult about implementing it. Clearly your employer just doesn't buy the concept at all. They probably only offer 3 weeks (slightly higher than average) as a recruiting incentive, which is pretty dishonest if they don't actually let you use it.

The reasoning behind this concept is what's important. It's about treating employees as equal partners in a relationship, as opposed to children, like most employers do.

Definitely read this essay if you havent: http://paulgraham.com/opensource.html
Definitely yeah. That'll provide 50k/yr of risk-free interest to live off of while you work on something you really want to buy the house, etc. You won't have to work a side job to support yourself and can focus full time.
Thanks for the stats, I was curious how things were progressing. I wished for such a site (I thought it would be a subreddit) for a long time. Happy to see it's going well.
Independent Individuals and Wise Crowds (Talk by James Surowieki, author of the book "The Wisdom of Crowds")
This is a bit smart, 'cos the clients fearing that fewer ads will be shown, will actually be willing to pay more $$s and thus the PPC rates will go up! Not sure about the long term impact though.. (eg. a frustrated client, inspite of bidding extremely high for a few keywords might not see his ad appearing at all, may switch to other system.)
Don't quote a number, quote a multiple instead. :-) eg. If XX invests 20k for 10% in your company. their 20k becoming 200k is a good deal which implies something like 2M for your company (not bad for three months work!)
Not quite, you should read Paul's essays (don't remember which exact one). VCs valuation depends more upon the amount of money (s)he's going to put and generally they won't invest smaller amounts for insignificant stake. Which implies you've to probably get more money than you really need and shell out a little more equity.
A follow up thought. This also puts XX (may be YC in this case) in valueing your company just right! (Ok YC are nice people so thats not a problem, but if you were asked this question in other context, you better be prepeared!) 'cos they cannot value your company too low. 'cos even if someone is willing to give 10x of their investment, you may say "No Deal" and if they value your company too high (like some VCs do), it almost rules out probability of a nifty 2M$ acquisition. (This is again from Paul's essays)). It's almost like RTFM :-)
And the sad thing is that there are really big stores with a lots of stuff but you have to visit at least two of them to get whatever you want :(.

Another really bad supermarket practice is when a product have got 3 different flavoring and one of them is going well, but nobody buy the other 2. The result is that they will abandon the product totally, it doesn't matter that one of the flavors went really well.
wow I am surprised this has gotten so many comments. Obviously it depends on the value of the company. If threw together a prototype that hadn't seen a single user and there was no apparent IP, then 100k would be a ton of money. If I were sitting on the next YouTube with millions of users added each month, then 1B+.
A great new airfare search site (...if you live in Minneapolis)
5 Business & Entrepreneur podcasts
I realize... My point was that some of the buying companies have been willing to buy companies that traditionally would be raising their first rounds. A classmate of mine sold his company to Fox Interactive for $7m (reportedly) before they'd even LAUNCHED.
I don't think you have to quantify anything, it's not a matter of science or math -- it's about how much that money means to you.

Just imagine some rich guy with a checkbook. Imagine what the minimum number he has to write in order to take your three month old baby. It's a realistic situation and the guy with the checkbook isn't going to pay you what you "want" he's going to pay you what you won't say "no" to.

Assume it's a cash only deal, but figure that if it's Google you'd go even lower on cash if it meant you have a sweet job and salary -- that's obvious.
Google's CPA Move: Will Microsoft & Yahoo Have To Buy Their Way Into CPA Game?
I would tend to agree with this. On first site, virb doesn't seem like a site where the content is produced by ordinary people. If I had no experience with the web or design, I would be kind of shy to upload my content as it might look too scruffy for such a polished site.

On the other hand, the sheer scruffiness of a myspace and some of the content on there drastically lowers the perceived entry standards for one to participate. Therefore you have more people unashamed to put up their poorly designed sites.
"...not the ones that are ugly because there was no money to hire a designer, or because the programmer thought he was a designer."

Like Google or Craigslist? Necessity is not only the mother of invention, it seems to have another child: great design.
Actually, it was probably Jason crawling news.yc indexing everything...
Spammer please spam elsewhere.
that is a great mascot
Wish I could vote it up 10 times. Best. Post. Evar.
No one seems to care, there's such a dire need for his site and no clear alternative.

Read his disclosure at the bottom of http://www.techcrunch.com/about-techcrunch/

He's gotten involved with a lot of startups he has profiled and heavily leverages his position to push his investments.
using nick names on NYC (news.ycombinator.com) ?
Not as good as Yahoo just before a massive jump in stock price :-)
We were having an interesting discussion some time back. Whether one should be using nick that involves his/her product name while posting on nyc?

Initially it occured that - using nicks is a good way to associate identity, but later on realized that it might actually be counter productive. Because to anyone it smells of "stealth marketting". Though that was not the original intention of using the nick, its just to o obvious to be believed otherwise.

We thought it'd be a good idea what others think of it?
Very interesting. Thanks.

What about charging a subscription? Viaweb was low-cost for the day, but would you even offer subscriptions at all if you were doing again today?
Viaweb Subscription Pricing Page from 1996
'... if there are no ads on your site, you will not make money off of it ...'

Where is the investment opportunity with ads? Is it the Aggregation of attention?, eyeballs? It's not about the advertising. The real value in the intelligence of users, not eyeballs? ... that's where the money is. [0]

The way I look at it, UGC (user generated content) really just another form of advertising? [1] So when you write content (commercial info about a product made for profit) I'm really writing an ad, my ad. I value readers & their ideas and as such don't want to distract them with freeloader advertisers.

Reference

[0] Dave Winer, 'How to Make Money on the Internet v2.0'

http://davenet.smallpicture.com/2001/02/13/howToMakeMoneyOnTheInterne.html#4

[1] Dave Winer, 'How to make money on the Internet, 26 November 2006, MP3, 10.6 Mb, 10 min.'

http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/cn26Nov06.mp3
Hmm, that would be in the right ballpark.
We might make it free for the lowest tier of users. The one problem with that, though, is that the users of this application are merchants. If you make it free without some other form of authentication, you make it easy for crooks to set up fake stores in order to defraud people.
Web Apps 101: Your Three Point Success Plan
I think the way a lot of other people would do this is by making it a hosted re-brandable application with a subscription fee. JotSpot is a good example.

This removes some of the biggest obstacles to adoption because the customer doesn't have to worry about installing, upgrading, security, maintenance, etc.

For the larger customers who must have the machine inside their firewall you can alway role out an "Appliance" version something like the Google Search Appliance.