skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The comparisons to phone numbers and home addresses are starting to piss me off. Those numbers are protected for personal privacy reasons and have nothing to do with copyrights, patents, or trade secrets.
Windows server software changed since and its now can be just the right platform as well as Linux/Apache.

Though Windows costs more, its not thousands and even not hundreds of dollars difference, its only 25-30 USD for the Windows Sever 2003 license per server. Client software doesn't matter at all.

For that price you get complete set of all required for web app technologies and tools: Windows Server 2003, IIS 6, Asp.Net 2.0, SQL Server developer edition.

In addition there is a free version of MemCached for Windows.
What Is Your Definition of Startup Founder(s)?
Does it mean the person or the group of people who conceived the idea?

The initial team who implemented it and brought the idea to reality/first prototype?

First X 'employees'?
AOL denies copying Yahoo's front page.
I'm working here right now. It's fantastic.

Feel free to come visit. Perhaps you can convince them to put pricing up, and/or offer discounts for YC folks.
Thanks for the ad hominem.

But I'll concede that I am an idiot. I'm looking at how original this idea is and what features separate it from other websites instead of looking at how awesome the design is and how cool it is because he got it up and running in 66.5 hours!

I wasn't impressed when there were a few Lisp clones on Reddit made and I'm not impressed that there's yet another clone of MySpace made with a nice design.

But you're right, "it's cool that he built something."
"For most people, Free Online Dating is way too much like personals in the newspaper so they don't bother."

Yeah it's a bit...not creepy but not the norm.

Your prediction has a flaw: it assumes that it'll grow large enough to be attractive to porn spammers :P

Also, I still don't see what there is to have "work". It's just basic features that I'd expect any social networking site to have. There's nothing dating-specific and no hints seem to be dropped as to what's going to be added.
Users revolt over bugs in Second Life
Posted on Scribd due to nasty ads on original site.
Beam It Down From the Web, Scotty
GigaOM: Comcast trying to become a Web player
What if the part-time work is a McJob?
One thing I dislike about the phrase "lucky or smart" is that it excludes a third quality more important than either of those two: energy.

All the successful startup founders I know are lucky, smart, and driven-- but above all, driven.
I do use vim, too.

Debugging without slime is quite difficult however: as everything is available through slime, nobody cares about simplifying access to SBCL debugging features from outside slime. For example, having to prefix every variable access with SB-DEBUG:VAR when in the debug REPL is a real pain, and serves no purpose other than annoying non-slime users.
That book is gold. And so are his other books. Who's up for a little Van Eck Phreaking? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_Phreaking)
I had a unique idea that I implemented in my part time. The site was featured on Techcrunch a few years back and quickly started making a lot of money. Within a few months a handful of VC funded competitors sprung up. They were able to iterate on the concept very quickly and completely destroyed me within the year by developing a significantly better product then I did.

The moral of the story: Working on your startup part-time is a great way to mitigate risk while you build out your first version. However, if you see some traction quit you day-job and start executing relentlessly.
That only depends. Some people are good only 3 hours a day, but you best believe that they will outdo most programmers who put in 8 hours/day.
Nevertheless I would advise you to quit your job and focus full time on your startup.
Will overhear.us translate outside SF? - "corporate america is not centered in California"
It's a safe bet you're attending too many meetings
20 tips to considerate when planning to start your own business blog
Probably not what you're looking for, but GWT can obfuscate its compiled Javascript with a command-line option. Seems to be bug free to me and is nice because its totally transparent to the developer.
New Hotmail overshoots audience
YubNub – a social command line for the web
I think this article has some interesting points about tailoring things to your audience, and thinking about who your audience is.

Specifically for Hotmail, I prefer the newer Windows Mail (or whatever they call it this week) version to the old Hotmail, but my mother was completely unable to use the new version.

I guess this is the danger when trying to create a product that is all things to all people... Microsoft's solution seems to be to have two products and pretend they are just one.
I'm actually quitting my day job today so I'm betting that a full-time founder is more productive.
Among the people who are around to make the first prototype, founders are the ones who, if everybody else had walked away, would still have made the venture happen.

Someone can be a significant contributor but still not be a founder. My wife and I agreed not to list her as a founder on my YC app even though her contribution has been significant. If I walked away from ourdoings.com, she probably wouldn't find another coder to make it happen. If she stopped contributing I would still make it happen.
What is your favorite popular link aggregator?
With the nearly endless supply of interesting links from del.icio.us, digg, reddit, news.yc, etc, do you use one of the popular link aggregators to stay on top of what's hot? So far I've come across three that look interesting: popurls http://popurls.com/ theweblist http://theweblist.net/ and trendalicious http://glozer.net/trendy/ I really like the mix of textual and visual links on popurls, but my favorite is trendalicious because it combines links from del.icio.us, digg, and reddit into one "top 100" list. Just wish it included news.yc too!
Breaking: Myspace acquires Photobucket
Photobucket bought by Myspace
Aaron Swartz explains why he left reddit
5 Reasons to Read VentureHacks (if you're not already)
Sustained 100 lines/hour is fast for me too. Burst speeds of 100 lines/hour over an hour or two are entirely reasonable. That's less than 2 lines/minute - if I'm coding as fast as I type I can usually do 7-8 lines/minute, so it's ample padding for debugging, optimization, design work, etc.

The conditions for burst productivity ("flow", in the psychological literature) are:

1. Well-defined, achievable goals

2. Automatic knowledge of your toolset - you don't have to look things up about your platform.

3. Fresh & well-rested

4. No interruptions

His article explicitly addresses 1, 2, & 4, and I suspect he arranged his time so 3 was satisfied too. He knew what he wanted from his site, and ruthlessly trimmed it so he only needed to implement features directly relating to the core goal. It was his 5th Cake PHP app, so he knew his toolset in and out. The 66.5 hours were not all spent in a row, and he had no interruptions or overhead while working on it.

These conditions also held in my Scrutiny example (done over Thanksgiving break my senior year of college, with some cleanup over winter break) and Bootstrapacitor (done over 2 weeks + 1 week of cleanup, finished about a week ago). They did not hold for FictionAlley (my first PHP webapp) or my startup (my first Python webapp, and we also don't really fully understand the problem yet), and those two projects take significantly longer.
Boston YC meetup was excellent!
I've been leasing servers on 1&1 for a long time. They claim to be the largest hosting company in the world, and they are definitely not the worst. Unfortunately they dropped all their cheap server options last year and left $99 as the cheapest.
http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Server
I love Yubnub, and recommend it to everyone, but the site gets slow or unresponsive at times. I'd pitch in a few bucks if a Firefox wizard wants to cook up a plugin that functions similarly to Yubnub but runs entirely locally, with customizable commands.
I would get a Xen VPS since you get a guaranteed amount of CPU, RAM, disk, and bandwidth as well as full control of the kernel, firewall, software, etc. I've been very happy with http://serveraxis.com as well as http://unixshell.com but definitely do a bit of research first, http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ is a great resource for that.
I really enjoyed meeting those of you who came. Saw a bunch of cool demos, heard a bunch of cool stories, shared experiences, etc.

We should do this again soon! As Paul Buchheit recent blog post suggests, I think it's great for potential/current/former startup founders to hang out with like-minded folks and produce a shared "mental frame".

I look forward to seeing the mailing list and setting up a Google group.
Business Plan 2.0: Eliminating the Fortune Telling
I use my own plugin that I wrote for IntelliJ (Java IDE). I've been using IntelliJ for so long that I just like the feel of it, so I chose to do that rather than learn a new tool. I only whack Lisp code for fun, so it works OK for me.
Small Business Hub - Shortest Tutorial Ever on SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
How the New Rich Define Success
From Aaron's blog:

I say a bunch of things in the interview that are probably going to upset various people I know. In my defense, it was an interview -- I didn't rehearse my remarks in advance

I'm guessing two of those people are the founders of reddit. I don't think they saw things from quite the same perspective.

Edit: there's more discussion about this on reddit - http://reddit.com/info/1octb/comments
Where did you get the $25-$30 USD figure for Windows Server? Pricing a server at dell.com shows $799 for Standard and $3,295 for Enterprise (useful if you want more than 4GB RAM or 4 CPUs) But the OS isn't so expensive compared to SQL Server which is $5,799.00 for a Standard single processor license, or $25,009.00 for Enterprise (useful if you want all of the high-availability features).
That is sad - I sympathize with you. What was the idea and why couldnt you also get funding when it started making money?
I currently have a job like that but it is not too much of an advantage. One still has to put in 40 hours of productivity and you get tired at the end of the day like any other.
Over 90% of everything I read on the web comes from http://originalsignal.com

A truly great site.
Wireless startup becomes innovative competitor to Starbucks
It is very pretty, I had almost the exact reaction that you wanted from people when I first saw it. What program did you use for your graphics?
Was Aaron Swartz a founder of Reddit? I thought he joined Steve and Alexis after Infogami didn't work out.

Either way, he's a great hacker and that was great candid interview.
You could do alot of the same stuff in Quicksilver. Maybe they just need to make it easier to add plugins to it.
He was not a founder. When the infogami team didn't work out, Aaron, Steve, & Alexis "merged" inforgami w/ reddit, creating a new company - not a bug. They all got an equal share of equity in this new company. I think that's what several people find aggravating. Aaron got a huge amount of reddit's equity, but only put in a few month's worth of work into the site.

The lesson - always vest your equity. Not only for new hires, but also set up vesting schedules for the founders. This ensures everyone can make a fair exit, with no hard feelings.

EDIT: To clarify, by "not a founder" - I was answering the question, "was he a founder of reddit?" He did, of course, co-found not a bug. Here's their website, for the curious: http://notabug.com/ - I believe it's now defunct.

EDIT 2: There's also a pretty good thread on reddit that explains the background: http://reddit.com/info/1octb/comments/c1odac (for those of you who don't know, spez is Steve's alias).
Here's a blog post from november:

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/officespace
The company Conde Nast bought was a merger of the startups that made Reddit and Infogami, so the founders of all of them were legally founders of the combined company. Reddit ended up being better known than Infogami, so people thought of the company as Reddit. Actually I think its name was NotaBug.
Any word on the actual exit value?
It depends what your definition of a "founder" is...
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20187
Any plans for another one next month?
http://notabug.com/

According to the site, he's still part of the team. Was Notabug what Conde Nast actually bought? Do they own Infogami, too?
Top five cash flow mistakes, bootstrappers beware
PG on Unions
I'm sure it differs for each person, but personally I'd say the most important things are: get out of academia, get freedom, find a satisfying job with interesting problems and management who are technical, and work on interesting stuff in your free time.
Yes, CN bought NotaBug. I'm not 100% sure if they own Infogami, though; there might have been some deal where Aaron got to keep and/or open-source it.
Web 2.0 and the return of the startup incubator
Graham vs. Buchheit: All else being equal, should startups seek out hard problems or avoid them?
paul says that the way to build successful products is to avoid hard problems:

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/04/secret-to-making-things-easy-avoid-hard.html
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=16409
http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=17040

That made a lot of sense to me. But on the other hand, pg's "How to Make Wealth" makes a good argument for precisely the opposite view:

"Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him. What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we'd always take the harder one."

http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Of course, no piece of general advice is right in all cases. But what should you look for, in a given situation, to know whether it's better to seek out the hard problems or better to avoid them?
It looks like pg has now reposted the exclusive valleywag article here, if you want to vote that up instead: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=20218

It goes into more detail than this one.
advice = limited experience + overgeneralization - pb
I commissioned a Firefox extension to add a "Mark as read" button to news.yc: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=19816
I don't disagree with anything PB says. I say to do hard things if they benefit the user proportionately. He says not to do hard things just because they're impressive. Since in practice impressing people (including oneself) is the main reason people do hard things that don't benefit users, these two principles yield the same advice.
Obvious is an incubator?!
I say down with such vague philosophical arguments:)
I am reminded of how the folks who do most of the work almost never are the ones who appear the most (speak, write, show up)...

Speaking of which... :-)
Confirmed: MySpace to acquire Photobucket for $250 Million
Dang look at Steve Chen:)
http://www.levchin.com/paypal-slideshow/3.html
I don't quite buy the analogy. Manufacturing was a profitable business (particularly the auto industry) during the union heyday. The same can hardly be said for most startups investing in infrastructure during the dot com bubble.
"A union brings democratic practices to the work environment."

Do workplaces need democratic practices? I've never worked for a company that threatened my life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness -- mostly, they tend to secure the blessings of (financial) liberty to myself and my posterity by paying me an amount that I find satisfactory. If they didn't, I could always cry oppression, but it would be more mature for me to just find a better job. And if I had a higher estimation of my worth as an employee than any employer, I might consider my own estimate incorrect.

It's a fallacy to apply your political principles to anything outside of politics. If you want to work for a business that runs itself like a country, work for GM (and pray for your pension).
Aaaagghh... we don't need to bring reddit to yc news. Note that PG didn't put a yc news link on this article.
Ventures have changed. During the Industrial Revolution, startups were started within a company -- Andrew Carnegie was a bond broker and speculator who got into a (very risky) sideline in steel; Du Pont was a gunpowder company before they started messing around with chemistry[1].

The auto business was enormously profitable for GM and Ford, but there were thousands of equally promising auto startups at the same time. Most of them built prototypes bespoke for rich people; none of them are still around.

[1] And cars. They used to own about a fourth of GM, until they were forced to divest.
Jey Check out the quick search feature in Firefox's bookmarks if you like this. http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-fifteen-firefox-quick-searches-129658.php

You can even add yub nub as a quicksearch. Now when it type "yb g cats" in the firefox address bar it sends "g cats" to yubnub which passes me to the google results page for cats. Lovely.
Actually there were a huge number of car companies, nearly all of which died. It was very much like happened with Internet startups. In fact during the Bubble Rupert Murdoch used the history of the car business as an example to explain why he wasn't in a rush to invest in Internet companies.
This is Tim Rowe at CIC. Pricing is in the $500-$1000/person/mo range if spaces are used efficiently (we have 250 different spaces, so these are just guidelines). Availability is the main reason we want you to call in: availability changes hour to hour. One day we will come up with a cool web app to let you take a virtual tour of available spaces.
Alexa Traffic Charts Now Include Advertising
Democracy is probably useful for any institution with absolute power -- if there's a group that has the right to imprison or kill me, I'd rather they derive that right from the will of the people. But if all an institution can do is give me money in exchange for work, or give me stuff I want in exchange for money, democracy is an imposition that makes them less free. If a transaction can only happen with the consent of person A and person B, why on earth would you want Mob C to interpolate itself between them? The only positive results from that would flow to members of C or to parties that have coopted it.
A safe work environment should be guaranteed by legislation. Beyond that, if you don't like your job, you should find a new one. Democratic practices are completely unrelated to a work environment. No one is ruling over you. You're free to go.

Granted, switching jobs isn't a simple thing to do, mainly because our labor market is so inefficient. There are other things attached to having a job, like healthcare, that complicate things. If only we separated healthcare from employment somehow...

Out of curiosity, what gains did you get from forming a union?
"...cannot expect management to treat everyone equally and fairly..."

The best manager I've ever worked for once told me that he believed in treating people fairly, but definitely not equally. I think he had a good pont.
An inexpensive way to make great looking logos
I don't understand how that damages the analogy. The point of the essay is that an environment where you have to grow fast or die makes it better to overspend on some things than to waste time trying to bring the price down. If that's valid logic for an unprofitable company, it seems it should make even more sense for a profitable one.
Why would it not be democratic enough that you can quit your job if you are unhappy with the work conditions?

Of course there may be the concern that you would have no opportunity to find another job. However, then I don't understand why it is deemed fair for society to dump the social responsibility on the enterprises. Is it the companies fault that you cannot find another job, or is it maybe your "fault" that you lack the qualifications?

Ultimately society pays anyway: if the company has to overpay the inefficient workers, it's products will get more expensive, rest of society pays. I think it would be cleaner to just have society pay directly, which might enable economic pressure against the inefficiency, too (if society pays, the problem is open and can be tackled). Worst case is the whole company goes out of business because it cannot compete anymore.
"A safe work environment should be guaranteed by legislation."

You're confusing actions and goals. If we pass legislation banning unsafe environments, all we're saying is "Dangerous work should only be done by criminals." If you think coal mines and slaughterhouses are bad now, just imagine how much worse they'd be if they were run by the mob.[1]

They might even be as dangerous as mines in the kind of country that does try to guarantee workers' safety and happiness through legislation ( http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-11/13/content_391242.htm )

[1] We've passed laws that say "Nobody should smoke pot," but the effect of those laws is, essentially, "People should only buy their pot from someone who has little to lose from committing additional crimes, such as someone already involved in illicit traffic and already able to extralegally enforce illegal agreements.
I'm just not feeling it.

I think it is better to think of labor unions themselves as startups that eventually consolidated. They gained control of a resource that was in demand by a growing industry, manufacturing. They grew by competition and consolidation (as did their most successful customers) They supplied that resource at a price negotiated with their customers. Manufacturing prospered, and so did it's suppliers, including the labor unions.

The labor unions failed to adapt to a changing market (as did many of their customers), which is why they are on hard times.

That they failed to adapt says little or nothing about the considerable, commitment and sacrifice it took to found them. I agree though, that the presence or absence of those attributes in modern day union organization and membership isn't the whole story about why they are throughly failing today.
How about that Amazon stuff, is that hard to get started with?
"I think it is better to think of labor unions themselves as startups that eventually consolidated."

They don't make something people want. They take something people want and jack up the price to make them pay more for it. They're as much of a startup as OPEC -- the only difference is that they're cartelizing labor instead of oil.
Dojo's "ShrinkSafe" compresses Javascript, rendering it virtually unreadable and considerably smaller. From the documentation at http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/shrinksafe :

To demo our compression system, let's build an example that we want to compress. Here's the listing for infile.js:

function MyClass(){
this.foo = function(argument1, argument2){
var addedArgs = parseInt(argument1)+parseInt(argument2);
return addedArgs;
}

var anonymousInnerFunction = function(){
// do stuff here!
}
}

function MyFunc(){
// this is a top-level function
}

// we've got multiple lines of whitespace here

We run it through the compressor with this command to generate outfile.js:

java -jar custom_rhino.jar -c infile.js outfile.js 2&1

And the contents of outfile.js should now look something like:

function MyClass(){
this.foo=function(_1,_2){
var _3=parseInt(_1)+parseInt(_2);
return _3;
};
var _4=function(){
};
}
function MyFunc(){
}