skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i'm 24, being around the YC average opposes hapily to my feelings that i am too ooold...

it's great to be among this virtual tech startup community sharing the same stress and anxieties...maybe we should make some skype conference, public chat, skypecast whatever is called...

as a matter of fact i am opening a new thread here in news.YC right after this comment to suggest this.

*update: my suggestion is in this thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2336
It looks much better than the old one. I think using a dynamically generated mindmap would be better than a tag cloud, because not only would it be neater and cognitively easier to process but it would allow you to go backwards too.
Skype-cast (voice conference) for the start up community of news.YC
I was posting a comment to the thread 'How old are you?' when I thought of taking the initiative to make this skypecast:
Unofficial skypecast for the start-up community of news.ycombinator.com to share and discuss ideas, experiences or something to cheer them up.

Follow the link to this private skypecast on Mar 6th 2007:

https://skypecasts.skype.com/skypecasts/skypecast/detailed.html?id_talk=511191&hash=33f5dec4c41edfe41c44

P.S. I hope PG is ok that I used the YC logo
Isn't this just billmonk?
I'm 20, will be 21 in April. Will also be applying for this summer's Y Combinator round as soon as I can get my prototype/alpha up and running for basic testing and as soon as I can find a founder. It is ridiculously hard to find a founder when you're surrounded by 9-5 types who have a family and a mortgage. I should've done this while I was in college. Hopefully I'll see some of you in Cambridge.
The Best Buy Scam.
(Not) To Do List
I'm 23, my co-founder is 20. We are looking for another co-founder btw.
Books on Poster -- http://www.booksonposter.com
Wikiosity -- http://www.wikiosity.com
Another co-founder? I'd be interested if you guys want to talk.
I've got invites to give too. Just ping me if you want one.
Why IT sucks.
YC backed Octopart launches search engine for gadget parts
IBM Many Eyes After One Month
I wonder if this was inspired by Langley Steinert's talk about vertical search.
Ah, looks like this is a dupe. My mistake. PG - any possibility that we'll have search functionality?
32. With wife, kids and new country.

I couldn't have done it any early. My collective experience over the last 10 years has really helped me focus on my startup Tinbag.com. As said above, having a supporting wife is a must. The new country part, I left England because it was just too cost probative to do a startup there.
An Early Stage Entrepreneur's Guide to New York City
I am by far, the oldest one here.
39. Perhaps I should forget about YC!
Sequoia Capital funded companies: 10% of Nasdaq's Value
I am by far, the oldest one here.
39.
Finishing my degree has been a personal goal for a while. I also know that I have a few gaps in my self-education that I want to fill in before I take the plunge.

That being said, I'm taking the summer off school to work on a project.
10 Django-Links for Newbies
I have a great deal of trust for startups that choose niche and vertical markets as an entry strategy (my article: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_startup_lessons_2007.php). As a company founder, it takes an incredible amount of discipline to resist the temptation of trying to build an "everybody" product. The best way to build a company is not by going after an existing category, but by creating a new category you can be first in. Startups must focus on creating new markets over serving existing ones.

Moreover, as an Electrical Engineering student, I understand that a Search Engine for electronic components is certainly a product in much demand. To top it off, they also managed to extract specifications of the parts in .gif/pdf formats which is absolutely essential when buying IC's or Transistors.

Congratulations to the founders and YCombinator. Great work guys!
A nice overview of New York for entrepreneurs
KlipboardzTV - Social TV and Movies
34. And like some others, wife's support and income are absolutely essential to make this all possible.
Less programming, more skill?
Octopart Launches (search for electrical parts)
Here is the other link: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2315

pg, why don't you ask us to contribute code to the site? We are all geeks and could probably code in parallel without straining your workload. I tried something similar on my "social network for geeks" and it worked wonders. Now I've more time to spend on building a business instead of just the product.
VelvetPuffin Launches (mobile + web social network)
Izimi, a sweet new way to share files!
Here is the other link: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2315
The Perils of Web 2.0 and Political Campaigning
Poll: Should a newspaper be a social network?
iSkoot (mobile Skype software) raises $7 million
It's amazing how small the Internet still really is. I'm guessing that many of people reading this have talked to multiple people on that list personally, and are connected to most of the rest within two degrees.

In addition to reading news.yc, anyone who has ever spent time in the wikipedia IRC channel or reading DailyKos or K5 can't help but having talked to at least a handful of these people.
KlipboardzTV is the newest addition to my social network Klipboardz. For a while I've wanted to be able to get my TV from the Internet but I really haven't found a good way to pull it off. I decided it would be great to apply the social news formula to Streaming TV and movies. This way when someone streams something they can post it to KlipboardzTV and then the community can decide if it's good or not. It's still in the early stages but let me know what you think.
I am 32 and recently married. For me the trick is to get this thing started before we have any kids, as I am doing my startup in addition to a 9-5 (for now) and I know having rugrats competing for my attention will be a major demotivator.

The founders of the company I work for during the day are late 30s and one of them about 50.
I'm 25 and feel like I'm just starting to get the hang of this stuff! Some friends and I tried to start a Video Game company out of college and it didn't get us very far. Once I started working a 'real job' I quickly realized how much better it was to be your own boss. I've been working SO much harder now than I ever thought about working in college or right after. Real life is a great motivator ;)
Will Digg.com be sold in 2007?
Considering Reddit's exit strategy last year, it makes sense to evaluate if Digg will be up for grabs this year. While LinkedIn and Facebook have signalled towards a possible IPO, Digg hasn't. So in your opinion, will Kevin Rose receive his big paycheck this year? Who is likely to acquire them, and for how much?
Hey Veritas - send me an email at sumon [at] zintilla.com. Bonus: if you have mad rails skillz
12 Quick Tips To Search Google Like An Expert
And We Needed Proof Alexa Is Terrible
I think he's wrong on ToDo lists. Trying to keep everything you have to do in your head reduces the available cycles you have left for productive work. This is the main idea behind Getting Things Done.

I think news.yc is truly on the forefront of procrastination technology. It's the ultimate in infotainment, because you aren't getting anything done but yet there is something about it that makes you feel not completely unproductive.

I think this is a good principle for evil web startups to incorporate. Trying to get the same entertainment and addictiveness of WoW, but with less of the feeling of wasting your life (even though you are).
When you have a lot of committed users that frequent its always possible to come up with strategies that dont involve just the normal advertising channels. e.g. suicidegirls sells branded merchandise and bebo is getting into parnerships with amazon and ebay. So this article is a bit simplistic and I think you could make $50m revenues with a lot less users than it dictates.
Shouldn't "Do NOT read a worthless 5 page list of things you shouldn't be doing" be on that list?
Online Content Bundling
Digg's generated revenue is still nothing to sneeze at (an article in BusinessWeek reports that they brought in $3 million in ad revenue for 2006). I wouldn't be surprised if they held out for quite a while longer.

Kevin Rose seems to be putting a lot of energy into Revision3 right now. Seeing as Digg is a integral part of some of their productions, I think they'd like to retain control.
Simple, effective web notepad (from Emmett Shear of Kiko)
Many Eyes - IBM's social use of visualizations
This is a duplicate submission -- sorry. :)
SocialURL Launches - Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and More in One Place
Here is another service meant to address the difficulties in managing your fragmented web identity. There hasn't been anything really great yet, so we'll have to see how SocialURL does.

With so many serve options cropping up at rapid rates, whoever truly solves the problem of getting your identity together has a hit on their hands.

I've mentioned OpenID in some discussions on here... now I'm talking about taking it a step further.
just for fun: UselessAccount.com
Is there a service for testing out how well a domain name might work out in practice?
Test Driven Development (Python & Ruby)
Given the importance of a domain name to the success of your startup, I was wondering if there is a service that allows you to test out your proposed domain name to see how well it is likely to work out? For example, a domain name company might give discounts to users who give back meaningful feedback on domain name proposals from other users.
silly yahoo link will time out. Here's the original: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129301-page,1/article.html
It looks like there might not be database migrations for Turbogears based on this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2397 . (Note that the post specifically refers to SQLAlchemy, which will be used in future versions of TurboGears.)
I'll be the one that points out the obvious problem in that. After realizing the strength of a domain proposal, what stops another from quickly grabbing that name? I'm assuming this is all prior to you actually registering the name yourself, since you'd sink a lot of money into purchasing every proposal you can muster up.
Maybe some way could be introduced to reserve the domain name proposed temporarily during this testing period.
I liked this article and I think it's applicable to many other things besides programming.
Second the thread archive. I heard there was a secret YC video posted in an old thread but can't find it anywhere! :(
2006 Startup school notes by William Manegold
I enjoy playing devil's advocate, so bear with me. :)

What community can you trust to give you proper feedback on a domain name? If it's a community of people also scouring for domains, what if they decide to hide their approval?
Question for founders: Do you own your technology?
It's one thing to have a novel idea. But do you have a competitive advantage in the form of, say, a patent? Discuss!
Skype founder's mile-high antics
Doing One Thing Right: Couchville
Who is your dream investor?
If you could have anyone, VC or angel, invest in your startup who would it be (YC excluded)?

For me I think it'd probably be either Ron Conway or Ram Shriram - they seem to be the closest thing there is to a bridge between traditional angel money and VC.
Excellent. Thanks for posting this.
do not sleep?
i feel sleepy rithg nowww
I don't know of a good solution, but I think the problem is worth exploring given the importance of choosing a compelling domain name.
List of All Google Subsidiaries
I'm not exceedingly familiar with too many VC names at this point, but I'd second Ram Shriram. Dave Cheriton would also be a great person on your side, but he's more of an advisor. For VC, John Doerr from KCP&B comes to mind.
If this had existed a decade ago I might have ended up as an EE. As a kid I had just as much interest in electronics as I did in programming, but having no money and growing up in suburban hell with no decent electronics stores within driving distance, I couldn't pursue it. I think this is the most promising YC startup to date (based on what I know about them when they launch; obviously Reddit is successful with probability 1).
Changing the Web- Age and attitude (from digg)
These types of stories are starting to be pretty common, but this post does interest me from a business standpoint. How often does "no business plan" work out in the long run?
32, wife and 3 year old son. My son might be a cofounder also, depending on the YC rules.
I bootstrapped my first company when I was 23. The company hit a positive monthly cash flow a few months ago and looks like it will break even in 2007. The invaluable lessons that I've learned in the years since finishing college have given me a much better perspective about how the real world operates and will certainly help in future entrepreneurial ventures. Holding down my day job at a multi-million dollar software company (with less than 20 employees) has also helped me learn how to manage and how to sell.

I will be 26 next month, and I've never felt more prepared.
Jeff Bezos, Jason Fried, Tim Oreilly, Michael Arrington, Paul Graham
All of these guys are my heros
Larry Page's tips for the entrepreneur (~5 min video)
analytics - build your own or off-the-shelf?
Does it make sense to go with something like google analytics, or is it a better idea to write your own code for the purposes of gathering and analyzing stats for your web app?

If it makes sense to go with an off-the-shelf package, which one is the best (and why?)
All great names but if it came down to one of them - who would you want to put the money in?
'... the power of positive thinking ...'

Not so much the power of 'positive thinking' as accepting the 'reality of the situation' and making sure you can get beyond it. Another example of this type of 'conscious acceptance of a situation' can be found in the phrase ... 'there is no land-rover' ~ http://tinyurl.com/35xy9m
My absolute favourite is Guy Kawasaki. He's a genius.
Micheal Moritz and Paul Kedrosky also would be exciting to work with.
Jason Fried
Because he will put in Less. Money that is.
I am 25 and feeling very old
A Call for Entrepreneurs who wished to be interviewed
KillerStartups.com
No one. I would prefer to be able to grow a business that is profitable, not one desperate for an exit strategy before funds run out. I've seen what happens when a company tries to gamble on getting bigger and fails (investment bankers are not nice).

With VCs you trade time (to find them) and control in exchange for money and contacts. That is often a good and necessary trade but one I personally would not like to need to make.
Mint (http://www.haveamint.com) is a great application with an exceptional interface.

If you can design your own system that serves your needs better, then that's even better.
You're going confusing two things here. Raising investment for your company is not the same as having a business model dependent upon acquisition/exit strategy.

Remember ever investor dreams of getting stock in the next Google - the one piece of their portfolio that will make up for all the other losses combined. A big hit of nature will come either from a massive acquisition (like YouTube - but just how many acquisitions have there been on that scale? The media hypes these up a lot but that distorts the actual perception of the regularity with which they occur) or from running a sustainable business e.g. Facebook that can grow by itself.
I'm also a Guy Kawasaki fan. He and YC's own pg have contributed heavily to my idealogies regarding creating a successful product.
Unless you're confused on investing vs. acquisition (refer to Harj's reply), does this mean you plan to bootstrap the entire company yourself?
Is anyone aware of any advantages in, say, corporate taxes for having subsidary being incorporated in Delaware?

Most of these subsidaries, including YouTube, have its jurisdiction in Delaware despite being founded and located elsewhere such as CA.
Request for Investigation of Companies That Engage in "Buzz Marketing" (pdf)
Technorati's Opportunities and Exit Options
It was a marginal presentation (nothing to the magnitude of inspirational). You might wish to change the title to "Google cofounder's tips for entrepreneurs": That is likely to gain more traction :)
What do you think about Apollo?
Since I'm working on an Apollo/Flex business app, I'm just curios what you guys think about Adobes upcoming platform.
Programming Language Wars (by Tim O'Reilly)
The Blindfolded Entrepreneur
Physics, Psychology and Software: Google Tech Talks - Adam Bosworth
Hey Harjy - Jeff Bezos would rock. Very few investors would bring the wisdom bezos brings. Legend.
That would be ideal. That is usually not feasible but the title did say "dream".
Guy writes amazing books, no offence, but whats guy's investment trackrecord? Reid Hoffman or Peter Thiel would be great guys to get investment from. Reid has an incredible trackrecord - last.fm, digg, facebook, friendster etc
You're going confusing two things here. Raising investment for your company is not the same as having a business model dependent upon acquisition/exit strategy.

You are correct, the two need not come together. I was thinking of the traditional idea of a technology startup.
It Never Gets Easier Than Now
Odd that Bill seems to measure the quality of a hacker by his ability to optimize. For me the test of a good hacker is inventing new kinds of software. Bill's test is probably an artifact of Microsoft's circumstances. Presumably hackers there rarely get to initiate new projects.
Sequoia.
What is the best hacker/entrepreneurial community where you live?
SF Chronicle article about new search startups
paul would you pick sequoia over angel if you were early stage and it was the first round of money you were raising?
I just heard about Ignite Seattle (http://igniteseattle.com) and it made me think about this, In Portland the best I know of is OEF (Oregon Entrepreneur's Forum), but its not nearly as hacker oriented as Ignite Seattle seems to be (although I haven't been).
How do you combat "entrepreneur's ADD"?
I think that all of those videos are great.
Turned 23 last month. I feel really old because I'm a 5th year in undergrad. I thought this would be really cool, but not so much so.
was this a duplicate?
I think this is a promising field. We'd be interested in funding more startups doing search.
It happened to my last 10 ventures: I would work couple weeks on them, launch, get bored and move onto the next thing.

That was until I sat down and decided to commit 6 months to iJigg no matter where it went. Yet, 5 months into it, I am already getting pretty restless with other ideas I want to pursue.

The only good thing in this episode of my "entrepreneur's ADD" is I am planning ahead. I am thinking by May I should begin work on my next idea which is in itself progress for me(rather than waking up one morning and abandoning one ship for another).

I simply need some experienced folks to tell me my killer idea can still be done six months down the line. The good thing about the nature of my idea is it relies more on implementation details than the concept itself.

Seeing the bad job the current players have been doing in the space for past two years I want to say it is unlikely they will figure out what they are doing wrong in the next six months. If only I can convince my mind of this so it can focus totally on more priority items:) How would you?

To be clear I am beyond the stage where I will ACTUALLY leave a venture that is going well prematurely for another. But that still does not take care of the mental buzz created by the new idea.
Don't Lose Your Visitors: Better 404 Pages
An Economic Explanation For Why DRM Cannot Open Up New Business Model Opportunities
The nice thing about google analytics is you can have it set up and working in 5 minutes. The nice thing about mint, or rolling your own, is that you can get all of the metrics you want - googalytics isn't really extensible.

One thing is, neither googalytics nor mint (I think? don't use it) can report on xhr requests, since they run script onload. Anybody out there have a tool they like for doing that? Like a favorite log analyzer?
And there was much rejoicing! yaaaaaay. Thanks, Paul!
I'm a programmer, so it's pretty rare for me to disdain someone for being a nerd, but, geez-o-man, there's nothing like Larry Page in action.

Oh, have you seen his girlfriend:

http://static.flickr.com/47/112343641_e3af8465d9.jpg
37 and smarter than you little snot-nosed whipper-snapper holligans! And turn the music down!
Am I restricted to people who are actually in the seed or VC business? If not: Woz.
There's now a "best ever" page: http://news.ycombinator.com/best
This is now fixed: try the "parent" link.
we now have this
Now that is an interesting idea. I'll mull over ways to do it.
We now have this: the "parent" link.
Nice: VB has gotten about cut in half. Die! Die! DIE!
This is now fixed. Every form now does a redirect afterwards.

(It turned out to be a lot of work. The software used to think in closures and I had to make it be able to think in urls as well.)
I'm considering doing this for questions (i.e. submissions with blank urls). I think it would be a bad idea for stories.
Here's something I'd like to see tried: fetch the text of the referring page, and use Google to figure out what they meant to link to.
VB was the world's most widely adapted language until Microsoft decided to lift its support in favor of VB.NET.
Google search is pretty big. Is it a social network?
Anyone know any for Vancouver, BC?
Insightful ~
It was explained to me at a Microsoft recuriting session that I attended a couple years ago that if you work for engineering at Microsoft your job title is either Designer, Programmer, or Tester. People who do one don't do either of the other two. (Although, surely there must be some niches like their research department where cirumstances are otherwise). So, since all Programmers are confined to the straight-jacket given to them by the Designers, the ability to optimize is probably the best way to differentiate the good ones from the mediocre ones.

Needless to say, I wasn't impressed by the recruiter's pitch. Then again, the recruiter probably wasn't impressed by the Tux polo shirt and EFF cap that I arrived wearing :-)
RIM betting against the internet?
Eclipse makes Java a compelling and highly productive language. Without Eclipse, perhaps Java would not have been as popular as it is today?
I wonder if it would make sense to make a search engine platform where (more technical) users can submit code for domain specific query entry, search, ranking, and presentation of results. Moreover, such code submissions would compete with each other, with more effective ones rising in popularity in their respective domains.

Unlike APIs that are currently available, the submissions made by users here would make up the core feature set of the service.

This is sort of like intentional programming, but applied to search:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tSnnfUj1XCQ

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZZDwB4-DPXE
Sequoia in a second, if they actually offered at that stage.

If a startup was super good, so good that what a top VC offered was rounding error compared to what the startup could do for itself, they might be better off with angel money, because they could name their terms, and they'd probably get a better valuation. Google did that for their early rounds. But few startups are that hot.
Great article. I'm personally starting to burn out on programming myself. I've always shunned the cloud around programming, but I'm finding that embracing the teamwork part a little bit more is helping me to recharge a little bit. Would love to quit and go hiking though.. that sounds rreally nice

Also loved how when I voted it up, but I wasn't logged in, my vote registered after I logged in. I'm guessing that's a continuation?
Tom Peters Re-imagine Manifesto!
That's why I didn't jump to name him as a "dream" investor. He just has a lot of good things to say which I respect.