skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A focused search engine for startup trend followers
This is a search engine I made with Google Custom Search to let me search for previous startup news/discussion blogs online easier.

I found that the general Google search has a lot of unwanted "noise" in its search results. Also I read a lot of RSS feeds from these startup-focused blogs/forums everyday and quite often I cannot remember where a particular article were from and may need to search multiple websites separately. That's why I created this startup-focused search engine.

It currently is limited to search for startup related news/forums on News Ycombinator, Techcrunch, Startupping, Mashable, Venturebeat and most read blogs from Paul graham, Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Don Dodge and a lot of other sites (currently ~80 in total).

Feedbacks are appreciated.
What pmarca is ignoring is that most people won't even try to come up with ideas by themselves. It's pretty tough to spend hours by yourself brainstorming on one topic. When you have someone (even a manikin) as resistance it can really draw out your best ideas. Nothing makes me come up with a clever idea quicker than someone suggesting that there's no solution to a problem. The real world difference between brainstorming as a group and as an individual might be the difference between some and zero.

What these groups of co-founders do together is more complicated than just sitting down and trying to think of ideas. I suspect the most productive setup is a kind of together-alone-together sandwich. Together you talk about some hard problem, probably getting nowhere. Then, the next morning, one of you has an idea in the shower about how to solve it. He runs eagerly to to tell the others, and together they work out the kinks. -- Ideas for Startups
I don't think the problem with single founders is about generating ideas. It's about not having someone to pick you up when you're discouraged, multiply your enthusiasm, and turn you back around when you've fallen in love with a bad idea.

Either that, or it's just that misery loves company. ;-)
Start-up watch: Tweaking boundaries to offer mobile TV
Hyderabad-based Apalya Technologies has partnered with 30 television channels and is conducting trials with an Indian GSM operator
Technology Bloggers, what are they good for? (YC News is # 19!)
The thing is I've been keeping my own "A list." I judge 772 feeds (which represents thousands of blogs since some of my feeds, like Microsoft's feed, has more than 3,000 bloggers on one feed).
Word of the Day: Startup
A company that is in the first stage of its operations. These companies are often initially bank rolled by their entrepreneurial founders as they attempt to capitalize on developing a product or service for which they believe there is a demand. Due to limited revenue or high costs, most of these small scale operations are not sustainable in the long term without additional funding from venture capitalists.
Cringely: the fallacy of Web 2.0, Microsoft ruthlessness, and the CB radio of our decade
Creative Financing for Startups: Mobilization Capital
Although normally overlooked as a financing technique for startups, prepayment is a proven and effective means of raising capital without surrendering equity or taking on debt.
TVGuide.com operator buys stake in BuddyTV
$2.8 million to help build online groups
Microsoft releases Works as free, ad-supported office suite
Only people who have had experience in dealing with telcos know how evil they are. And any company, no matter how much of an outsider they are at first, eventually becomes corrupted and also evil (see: Sprint as one example).

Google would have to specifically and repeatedly and publicly repudiate the status quo of telco behavior in order to have even a chance of avoiding the same fate, should they get into telco-like services.
Unless the two cofounders are smart, and simply brainstorm separately, then meet together to go over the options. Then they net twice as many and are able to more objectively filter the results. (Seeing the problems in someone else's ideas or code is one of the great benefits in having a cofounder - it helps eliminate a lot of wasted time)
I'm subscribed to ~25 podcasts but wouldn't recommend most of them... which I guess means it's time for me to clean up my list. Here are some that I would recommend:

Non-tech (in order of awesomeness):
30 Seconds with Phone Guy; WNYC's Radio Lab; This American Life; On Point with Tom Ashbrook; CBC Radio 3 Podcast; A Prairie Home Companion's News from Lake Wobegon;

Tech (NOT in any order):
MacBreak Weekly; This Week in Tech (TWiT); Freelancing on Rails; Ruby on Rails Podcast; Hivelogic Radio
Does anyone know if any Canadians have been selected for any of the startup camps?

atleast our servers are always cool inside our igloos :)
We have.

http://www.stormpulse.com

Python (Pylons framework) + nginx + Ubuntu + S3 + EC2
Despite glitches and a security warning, iPhones faring well
Google bets on mobile market
Web 2.0: Big app on campus
So, what are databases good for?
When do you prefer, say, text files and a filesystem to a database?
Beyond Ramen: A Cookbook for Entrepreneurs
Still not launched? and not even an ETA? So much for launching at eBay Live...

Lesson: don't announce a launch until you're darn ready to release the thing...
Women in startups...Where are they?
I've noticed that all of the "Leader" postings are, or seem to be(by screen name) male, and was wondering where all the women are? if you're female hacker let me/us know your thoughts...
Look at net neutrality. All it would take are a few telcos to decide to cripple bandwidth to and from google & googles adsense. This would scare off websites from adsense, make google slow and unusable, This would kill googles only real revenue source.

Maybe the whole spectrum thing is just a bargaining chip to use against the telcos.
fair point Josh, lesson learnt.
The Swarm: Attacking as a pack
If you think school is the answer, every university with an engineering department also has business courses. However, ourses teaching entrepreneurship and "innovation" are usually a joke.
Reverse YC funding program. PG, what's your thought?   
20 months from now I will be financially set from the sale of my not-launched-yet mobile startup and I will create the reverse yc program. Instead of funding techies, I will fund marketing and sales geniuses with unique ideas. We will provide them with the technical help they need to turn their vision into a product then they can make millions out of it. Meanwhile if someone has a few thousands in the bank you would run a trial program and get some proposal from non technical founders. For now I am still broke and in debt.
http://railscasts.com/ - Good quick ruby on rails screencasts

http://venturevoice.com/ - entrepreneur related interviews

http://talkcrunch.com/ - entrepreneur related interviews
I like your confidence, but I don't quite get it yet. Are you talking about the same type of ideas that would be submitted to YC now, but just by people who don't have the skills (at least currently) to implement them?
Sam Altman: #4 Coolest
I hope pmarca doesn't continue posting quotes in place of thoughtful original content.
I started reading Pmarca because he is one of my personal heroes, and because he was one of the few guys that seemed committed to writing smart original content. Recently, I noticed a tendency to post re-post content with a 1 line descriptor. I know Marc is busy....what with selling his company for billions, funding twitter, and running Ning... but I'd rather see 1/3 as many posts that are all original, than see his blog become an amalgamation of repostings like so many other silicon valley rags. Marc doesn't have a comment form to save time, so I hope this gets to him. Quality is important; I think that's why PG's rare essays are immensely more valuable than the flow of half-baked banter coming out of blogs like GigaOm these days.
Wow! What a great post! Starting right now, I will STOP FEELING GUILTY about being a single founder. I have read and re-read all of the negative single-founder propaganda here and other places. I was a little concerned, but somehow, deep inside, I knew better. Over the years, I have come up with thousands of fantastic ideas, sometimes with others, but almost always by myself. And implemented them with accolades.

For me, this article confirms what I already suspected. I don't need a co-founder to be creative and productive. It would be nice, but not necessary. You don't have to give up equity just to have a little give and take. A customer, a friend, even a stranger will do. My mind is my "ruby slippers". I've had everything I really need all along.

And, staunch, it is not my experience that "most people won't even try to come up with ideas by themselves". Then again, maybe I'm not "most people". There are so many wrongs and so many opportunities in our field, it doesn't take much to get the juices flowing. Just a little customer interaction or 5 minutes on a bad app, and I have 10 ideas to run with. Which reminds me...back to work.
That is what I think he is trying to say. This is a situation where someone has the idea and needs to find the resources (programmer) to make it a reality.
> I will fund marketing and sales geniuses

> We will provide them with the technical help

This is quite common already. Remember all those companies everyone made fun of in the 1990s, like Pets.com? That is how they came about.
Yes. I am speaking from personal experience. It took me forever to find a technical cofounder. If I had technical support in the beginning from experts maybe I could have sold and market it.there are lots of people who know what they want and how to build a company, but they just can't make it.
How To Know When Being Given A New Title Means You Just Got Fired
I was just making a comparison of pricing. Not everyone needs a database, and not everyone will be too bothered by the other EC2s drawbacks. For my app the persistent storage issue doesn't matter, and EC2 is good value for a number of other reasons. I agree that for the OP's needs EC2 probably isn't worth bothering with.
Correct me if I am wrong. But I believe in those situations they would fund your idea and let you hire techies. Now how can you hire a dev when you do not know what ajax is? So the program would will provide the best teams and ideas with technical support. People who know the differnce between php and ruby and scaling and browser based etc....
The Greatest Secret to Raising Venture & Angel Capital
Raising venture capital secrets.
How would you provide the technical help?
Hire developers for 2 months and work on the apps. Invest 15,000 for development like PG maybe. I mean guy launched truemors for 12K
It is hard to come up with original content on a continuous basis. Maybe Marc believes that the quotes are repostings are relevant for his audience to read. Regardless of the reasoning, keep up the good work Marc.
Food and Open Source come together thanks to a nice startup
At Ohio State University they have started an entrepreneurship minor and there were a good number of engineering students in my classes. Maybe the engineers that you have witnessed need to take the action to join a business course.
Typically people with a software idea aren't completely ignorant of technology and they usually know at least one person who knows the difference between php and ruby. Are you proposing that you will create programming teams for completely clueless "business people?" Hasn't the continent of India already positioned itself pretty well in that space?
Have a Sprint phone?  Sign up for Loopt!
This would be something I would be incredibly interested in.
Dude have you ever try hiring a developer? It can be really hard for someone who has never done it. 40 percent of the time they get played and let with half a website.
I work for an Indian firm and everyday we get people who complain about how some other dev messed up their project and they must launch soon.
I got your back. Give me 20 months unless someone do it right now.
Yes, I am responsible for hiring people at my startup. It is really hard for me to hire people, and I know what I'm doing. With that in mind, what you are suggesting is impossible.
I'd be more confident in the results if there were some measure of the individuals and their skill sets. Smarter people can probably always have more ideas than a group of less intelligent people.
Interesting anecdote, but completely mistitled.

After reading the article, I didn't feel like I learned any secret to raising venture and angel capital, I just learned a trick for managing it once it's been obtained.
"As per my opinion it is a very good and nice work, excellent design as per menus, important is very my clear outlook and visible buttons labels are also very much user friendly, there are some problem with web application which hides text links"

I think the bot is malfunctioning...
The title's big, and the discuss link is tiny. Bad idea dropping the big target, I think.
If you think engineers can get carried away on tangents, I don't think you will find much better out of marketing and sales geniuses (whatever this means). Maybe it's better to save your money and invest in people that are more grounded instead of those who sling the most buzzwords around.

It's hard to build a nanotechnology social networking viral space play without engineers.
"What pmarca is ignoring is that most people won't even try to come up with ideas by themselves."

All you have to do is tell each other that you're going to meet to discuss the ideas that you've thought up in three hours. The social disincentive of looking pretty lame if you show up with nothing is enough to get people to do it. He's not saying a group of one is better, but the combined individual efforts of a group are greater than when they all think about things together.
Edward de Bono, the so-called grandfather of creativity, describes this approach in his groundbreaking book "Serious Creativity."

Basically you always want to generate ideas separately, then expand on them in a group. The reason is that a group approach from the start will squash somewhat crazy concepts before sufficient time has been put into making them practical. As a result, the most creative ideas are shot down before they are given a chance to be refined.

Instead, if you generate ideas on your own you can spend more time on a half-baked concept in order to round out its flaws. Then once its ready, other people can help provide different perspectives on the idea without shooting it down outright.

Therefore I don't see this article as simply advocating a single founder approach. However, co-founders should harden their new ideas on their own before proposing them to each other for critique.
Every 3rd rate guy who accidentally made a couple million dollars in Silicon Valley is considering doing some variant of this right now, so you'll have a bunch of competition.

Maybe you could name it "Incubatr 2.0" and have the tag line "this time around, we don't even provide office space!"
One minute guide for encrypted file sharing
Easy method to share and exchange huge files amongst a private community of friends/family/co-workers.
Is Google Really Good for Small Business?
Google and startups.
Fallacy:
If they are sales geniuses/marketing geniuses, they won't need you to get the 15k. They don't need a YC. They have the loot and the connections already.

The good thing about technical entrepreneurs is that they know if their projects in mind are realistic. They can also actually go out and build it exactly how they envision it rather than relying on someone who works according to their own schedule with their vision on how it should be. This basically leads to things being developed slower where speed is the #1 thing a startup has going for it.

p.s: what exactly is a sales/marketing genius?
This is a great idea, because sales and marketing geniuses are really really useful when you have don't have a product and don't know how to build one.
It's still a lot more meaningful to go by whether the paychecks stop coming. Hell, they can make me Chief Officer for Supervision of Screensaver Latency, and I'll knock back a few every lunch in celebration.
> "The Greatest Secret to Raising Venture & Angel Capital"

I think what you were meant to take away is that investment capital is easier to get once you proved you can generate cashflow upfront. You don't really have to prove you will have a product that produces cashflow, you are already doing it. And investment capitalist believe in the market.

So I think it is aptly named, if you think you need to go through the typical steps to getting money you can ignore that if you just start making money. So why then do you need money? To grow the business faster then the market would otherwise allow.
Partner. "Difficult takes a day, Impossible takes a week." This is how revolutions are started
Yep and to those who dont believe than you must believe the following "Build it and they will come". I dont.
Might be a little different if you have a family and mortgage, but I understand your point.
i ll answer that when you answer what exactly is "talented developer/programmer". We can both write books on the subject.
Read this and thought it would add to the discussion:
Who's Minding the Mind?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/health/psychology/31subl.h...
This is the situation that I'm in. I work in the mortgage industry and I've identified a problem and solution that I never would have seen otherwise. I have a solid tech understanding but my skills are not currently good enough to produce the quality of web app I want.

I don't want to wait too long and I don't know how long my window of opportunity will be open so I've hired a coder to begin development. However, if I could have been paired with a coder and a little funding I'm sure things could have been easier and I might have been able to be to market right about now.
So your company will be generating 94% of the value instead of 6%?
Can you actually teach entrepreneurship? It seems more like a state of mind that you have to learn over a long time of self discovery.
Is your issue with the brainstorming quote that Marc didn't write it, or that it isn't of the quality you've come to expect from the pmarca blog? Choosing high-quality content is a valuable service. Quality and originality are orthogonal.

The brainstorming quote may not have the wow factor of some of the pmarca essays, but it's certainly relevant to people interested in startups, who spend a lot of time talking about ideas.

PG has some thought-provoking non-original content on his site too, by the way, e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/perils.html
Stanley Milgram: The Perils of Obedience (1973)
A thought-provoking study of authority vs. responsibility. It becomes relevant to startups when they start hiring.
Well, I guess I'm set then since we have everything but.

Could have fooled me, but what do I know. I swore off investors for a while last year after my partner quit and things were looking bad.
Besides being thought-provoking, this excerpt from a 1974 book describes a behavior pattern that becomes relevant to startups when they begin hiring.
"wow, you really bummed me out, because the dozen other people I had talked to before you were all like, `a free groupware system, that's an awesome idea!' Then you depressed me, and I came back here and told the other guys what you had said, and they were all, `Oh, fuck. He's right.'"

man, I hate that.
...still sounds great for my app, actually.

My crazy caching design shows it's benefits after all!
Multitouch is one of those things that everyone can understand is great. People look at it and get it and want it. It's a big reason why the iPhone is what it is.

Now, of course, there's still the gorilla-arm problem if you want to put it on a wall, but Cintiq or table-style, no problem. Folks out there should be thinking two or three steps ahead on this technology, I try to.

Keep your eye on Perceptive Pixel:

Article:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/112/open_features-cantto...

Demo:
http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.135867

Fascinating speculation:
http://informationrain.com/2007/06/10/resolution-independenc...
The only riff raff you get will be unsuccessful sales/marketing people. Your basically going to be paying for an idea. I am inexperienced but from what I have read, ideas are not worth a whole lot...

I would hope that the answer to your question is farely obvious......
Interesting to compare this with Paul Kedrosky's take on the Twitter funding:http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/07/26/the_twitter_les...

Another observation: if you apply this advice to a typical Web 2.0 startup, you get an employee. The "customer" of a free consumer web startup is its eventual acquirer: after all, that's who's going to pony up the cash that becomes the entrepreneur's profit. The "suppliers" are the users who donate their time, and sometimes the investors who donate the money needed to build something that makes it worth it for the users to donate their time.

You have three options for how you're going to manage time, cash, and users. You can go to your customer (the big corporation), and say "Pay me now and I will build something that hopefully users want. If they don't, you're out the cash." This is an employee. You can say "I will build something that users want, then when I have shown that users want it, you can pay me. If it flops, it's my problem." This is a bootstrapped startup. Or you can go to someone else, say "Give me cash and I will find users. Then the customer (big company) will want to buy us, and we will shared in the profits. If this doesn't happen, you're out your money and I'm out my time." This is a funded startup.

It also occurs to me that many of the misunderstandings behind Web 2.0 and doubts about the sustainability of free web startups come from this reversal of the roles of customer and supplier. Most people think of business as big companies producing a product that is consumed by ordinary people. The Web 2.0 entrepreneur essentially "productizes" consumers and sells them to a big company. This only works because brand loyalty and customer satisfaction have become tradeable commodities: 10 million loyal users and a product they use daily is considered an asset, even if none of them are paying you for it.
Sorry, don't mean to be a pain--- I was just anxious as your customers to see what the product really looks like (in a past life I did a fair amount of ebay stuff).
I am just glad the reddit guys didn't think it was impossible to change the way we get/submit news or any web relevant content. By saying it can't be done what you are really saying is I am not up to the challenge . Now I am not saying this is easy task.
How do you make a great video demo?
What should you do? What should you not do?
Los Angeles, CA - Startup in 3 days
Join a group to launch a startup from concept to prototype launch in 3 days in Los Angeles. See http://startup.eventbrite.com for more details.
Join a group of startup fanatics in Los Angeles to launch a startup from concept to prototype in 3 days. See http://startup.eventbrite.com for more details.
Which database do you use? If any.
I think robotics and automation will tranform our world in the coming decade. We are almost at the point where (if we put our minds to it), there's nothing that we can't automate (IMHO).
I feel that they give you an easy way to organize your data and map it to objects in the programming language. If you just use the file system, you have to reinvent the wheel. Since there are several free databases available, the costs shouldn't be a factor in the decision for using them.
Survival lessons from Man vs. Wild's Bear Grylls
So you're suggesting that if the paychecks stop coming, you'll know you're fired?