skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
'... First, "del" and "us" are easy to remember. Now you just place in the dots. So in terms of your memory, the difficult part is in the production phase (typing), not the storage and retrieval. ...'

Nice explanation. The way I remembered it was 'del' 'icio' 'us', pretty much the pattern you describe.

'... And pioneers don't follow guidelines, because guidelines were based on the pioneers. ...'

maybe that should have been a guideline.
"IT's rise to prominence as a core competence that delivers competitive advantage"

Stopped reading here. Sorry. :-)
I am only just starting to look - tough question. Maybe at a cartoon fair? Conferences? Local "special interest" group meetings? LinkedIn? Craigslist? Recommendations through friends? Parties at the local arts college?
Doing a Startup vs. Building a Business
This article highlights an area of confusion, I think. Of course, any new business is a startup. So, even your aunts diner that is opening soon is a startup.

But when we talk about a "startup" here generally we're talking about a technology startup, or mroe specifically, a web oriented technology startup.

But we're not necessarily talking about: Funding, organization, theoretical growth rates, etc, for that company.

So, I think the term "lifestyle business" should be banned or rejected by this community. Its a derogatory term used to apply to people who are chosing to go a different path, with the implicit assumption that that path is lame (eg: low growth, low chance of getting rich.)

There are certainly a lot of choices that founders have to make with regards to whether they are building a real business or not (EG: something sustainable that will make them rich even if a $10B+ company doesn't buy them in 24 months... rather than something that's a feature built to flip to someone with a real product offering.) ... and funding, location, team size, team composition (eg: when to hire marketing or sales people), etc are all independant of whether you're building a business.

You could bootstrap a company built to flip, or you could use VC money to do it. You can use VC money to build a real business, or you can bootstrap a real business.

But I believe, strongly, that building a real business is the only way to go-- its the most likely path to getting flipped, and its the way you will end up with something more than an adrenaline hangover after 24 months.

I hope this is making sense...

In summary, focusing on the business is the path to success... and recognizing all of these choices (including who to take money from) have advantages and disadvantages for the business case. For instance, one option might make great short term financial sense but be damaging in the long term-- if its a build to flip situation then you don't care about the long term. But in making that choice, you're risking the flip taking longer than expected....

So, build a business.

PS-- Justification for this long post: I was recently talking to a startup, and they are totally focused on being acquired within the next 18 months. Thats their plan. Their only plan. Every decision they make is with that assumption, and they are going to be in a world of pain 24 months from now if they aren't acquired in that time period. Worse, I think that if the followed a the right strategy, between 18 and 48 months from now they'd grow from a $250M business to a $4B business.
Man, I'm amazed at the bitching here... Someone's trying to help foster startups in europe! The horror! There's no way it can be decent, right? Jesus.....

Its not like the idea of doing early stage funding is that new, nor is the idea of havign an application form new. Ok, so the questions may not be original-- but that's flattery, its not like the YC form is a trade secret!

Getting startups together for a fixed period in a fixed place is relatively new, and seems to be a YC idea. Ok, so what does it mean when others emulate this? IT means they think its a good idea! How does this hurt YC?

YC is evangelizing a different approach to early stage funding. Now others are emulating the idea-- there is no way in hell that this can be a bad thing!

This is called success!

Do y'all who were rejected by YC hate the fact that there are now other options?

Or do you think that these people are going to steal all the "good" startups from YC diminishing their pool?
If %50 of the value of YC is the fact that they require startups to locate in Boston or SF, then any startup who doesn't get into YC can get %60 of the benefit by simply relocating.

Seriously, I hope that %50 of the "benefit" of YC is not moveing to an expensive location where every resource you could need for a business is constrained.

I've seen no evidence that locating outside of SF or MA reduces your chances of success. (Though this is often claimed, of course.)
enki-

You need to set up a forum for prospective YEurope startups to communicate about the idea. I don't think this discussion is going to happen on this thread.
Thanks. Another reason why one should never go for the .net
great idea!

i've set up a google group (both forum and mailinglist) at http://groups.google.com/group/yeurope/

i'll link this from the main yeurope page too, after getting some well deserved (i hope) rest.

i'm not sure if ggroups is the perfect communication medium - better ideas welcome! if you want to insta-chat with us, we're big fans of jabber. my jid is enki@jabber.metalab.at. lets hope feedback stays on a sane volume so i can directly stay in touch with all of you.

paul
Chill out - I haven't watched the video, but if those were free granola bars, how can you steal them? You can only "steal" them. It is just being cheeky.
It's an opportunity to learn a lesson: people in general are mean, or at least they are often different from you. While it can be frustrating, maybe it's better to know the truth than to live on in an illusion. Especially as an entrepreneur you have to harden against rejection, because you will face a lot of it. In general, nobody will understand you - otherwise, somebody else would already have done the thing you are going to do.

Overall the whole karma thing is a bit weird, as I realized yesterday when I submitted the link to Steve Jobs speech in Stanford. I found the speech really touching and felt somehow bad for getting karma for his achievement - as if I am leeching karma. Probably karma is an unlimited resource in the universe (and especially in a LISP application, as the integer type doesn't seem to have a limit in LISP) and it doesn't quite work in that way (to gain karma, you don't need to steal it from someone else). But still...
That article made me try out Google calendar, but I am severely disappointed. It really is just a calendar - duh... I would have expected an Outlook replacement with task lists and stuff like that. The functionality seems to be the bare minimum. I haven't tried to share my calendar, though.
btw. this is an awesome quote from the aho report:

"Apart from more resources for R&D and innovation, a paradigm change that would preserve European values in a new social structure is needed for the achievement of the goal of an Innovative Europe." - Aho Group Report "Creating an Innovative Europe" (January 2006)
Hello Paul,

Your idea is interesting, but frankly, I don't get it. Your resume and your website do not hint at your having the money to sponsor the groups. You do not tell us how giving up a percentage of our companies is going to benefit us. The money is small - I could work on the side and make that money every month.

What is not clear is this:

1. Do you have the money for this? If so, from where? If a piece of software needed additional funding after 6 months, would you be able to do this (like pg put 50.000 in justin.tv)

2. Do you have the marketing reach? Will affiliating myself with you give me greater marketing strength?

3. Do you have access to legal information and advice? Can you offer this to your startups?

4. Do you have any connections to Venture Capital? Do you _know_ about venture capital, such as to give good or bad advice?
I agree, the downmodding of Juwo is a bit out of hand. He shamelessly self-promotes and seems to have some difficulty communicating sometimes, and many of his downmods are probably earned. But it seems overboard to me. It really feels like people are singling him out to evaluate bad comments, in cases where other posters' bad comments would just be ignored. He is getting an unfair level of attention.

It's not like he's a slashdot-digg swarm drowning out reasonable discussion. He's enthusiastic, respects this community a lot, and the site won't particularly be any better if he leaves.

It seems to me a lot like the cool kids not letting Juwo sit at their table.

http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/flame_79.php

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
iilwy guys know how to listen to feedback
I'm assuming more people than just me asked for some extra features, such as more distance searching options, sort users by game times etc. 3 times I've submitted feedback and 3 times my requests have been implemented within 36 hours.

Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the answers! :-)
People steal the Y Combinator app is because it's so good. You can't just google and plug in the "right" answers.

Interpreting the responses is the skill that matters.
I believe, strongly, that building a real business is the only way to go

I agree with you completely.

"Lifestyle" businesses don't get the any of the media glory, VCs and i-bankers won't pursue you, but they'll still be here, long after the current feeding frenzy is gone.

And that "lifestyle" is pretty good, actually.
With memchached you pay the performance price for interprocess communication to get to the data in your hashtable, even when the data are on the same machine. The RoR / PHP / Python models for web development have each request running in different process, so this is unavoidable for them. Java / C++ are more suitable for pg's architecture (obviously Arc / Lisp too).

Also when you use memchached as a db cache, be preprared to lose some transactional properies of the database storage.
New Tiniest Motherboard: Pico-ITX Form Factor
It looks like kpax uses the html macro from Allegroserve, which is a good thing. Does kpax support sessions?
We were very early adopters of both s3 and ec2, so much so that when we launched likebetter, amazon called us to congratulate us when they noticed the traffic spike!

So we never really trusted their reliability and built up integration with them in a hot-swap sort of way - so, while I'd love to take credit for weeks worth of work on this, switching meant changing around a few variables. :-)
Public Wi-Fi may turn your life into an open notebook
I was thinking about the Juwo web site and demo in this context a few days ago: http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/when_only_the_g.html

He might have a fantastic tool, but because of the way he's attempted to communicate it (both on this forum and his own web site) and the rigid technical requirements (sorry, but I'm not switching to Windows and/or installing a java browser plugin), he's made it impossible to build an audience or core community of users.
When I saw this post several months ago, I e-mailed the guy and chewed him out ("what on earth are you thinking", yadda yadda). He emailed back with an apology, something along the lines of him being a bit drunk when he posted it. Fair enough.

He had the balls a few weeks later to ask me if I would VOUCH for him to PG. Yeah, no, that didn't happen.
Ad firm adapts digital strategy / Out of necessity, Goodby focuses more on new media
I can probably write a similar site in any dynamic (dynamic enough) language in 100 to 200 lines. It's the mentality, not the language... although the language you use may form your mentality, too, of course.
It's all about commitment folks, simple as that. People over 30 and under 20 tend to have commitments that might get in the way of their startuping. My cofounder was 31, fwiw.
Did anyone notice they're ALSO using heysan's (a yc company) widget for their homepage? That seems pretty classy to me.
Tech news blog - Microsoft hits the road with 'Guitar Hero'
Wow, I can't believe I'm reading about domain-specific languages in InfoWorld...
Then can you please do something like that for a scheme dialect?
We saw their van parked in front of Cnet on Friday. It drew immediate attention with loud rock blasting and large screens. The "crowd" thinned to about 4-5 people after the first hour. This is in a place where hundreds+ walk by in an hour.

It was, however, a media savvy move though as Cnet published it. (When they first parked the truck, the music was blasting and you could see most people in the entire Cnet building had gone to the windows to see what in the (&( was going on.)
Possibly people were offended more by the plagiarism than the desire to fund startups in Europe. It is a bit much calling the thing Y Europe, for example. Seed funding doesn't require your name begin with Y.
Reporters' Roundtable Podcast: In the buzz battle, it's still Google over Microsoft
Bar Graphs aren't good for visualizing landscapes. Pie Charts aren't good for understanding physics.

It's a visualization. It's good for certain things. It's bad for others. I have seen tag clouds used very well, for example here:

http://chir.ag/phernalia/preztags/
Week in videos: From the tops in Webware to a geek topper
Gates: Asia to spawn tech breakthroughs
Real people talking to real people: A good way to design a b2b site
Depends if you want a single partner from incorporation to IPO, or if you just need some one-off legal advice while mucking around. I had a really good experience working with Carr & Ferrell on IP. Most of the bigger firms won't work with you if all you want is a proofread on some provisional patents. They were recommended to me by someone high up at Wilson Sonsini, and they did a great job.
I wanted to laugh. But I couldn't.
Sneak Peak Inside PageFlakes "Flurry" Release
Have you tried gwt under eclipse?
Reddit's moving towards Django. It seems like they're outgrowing web.py, which is really meant for quick & simple web apps.
How come they won't migrate to Rails instead?
And that "lifestyle" is pretty good, actually.

Actually, no, it's not. At least, it's not for me. Several of the businesses I've built in the past are "lifestyle" businesses. They're supporting me, they're paying my way through school, but they're not as much fun as you'd think. That's why I'm here, after all :)

Ask anyone who owns a restaurant, and they'll tell you lifestyle businesses are a lot like working at a 9-5. Only that there's much more to do, and the income isn't guaranteed.
What scares me is how the Chinese government will manipulate and use the MS workforce to help control the ideas reaching the Chinese Populace. Wouldn't it be that much more efficient to build censorship right into the OS? I would never want to make money this way.
The way Steve puts it - his original motivation for using python over RoR is that there's too much "magic" involved in rails. I think he doesn't think things being done for him, and rails does a lot for you...

That compounded with rails being slower and requiring an entire rewrite of the site, and it seems the decision to move to django is a no-brainer.
It also implies a collaboration with YC, which doesn't exist.

Regardless, I think it will be hard to fully replicate the YC model, because it's unlikely these firms will generate the following YC has. This following equates to attention, press, prestige and connections for all the new YC companies.

Without all that, all you have is an angel investor. And there's nothing new about that.

Really, when it comes down to it, this is just an enormous validation for what's happening here. After all, "imitation is the best form of flattery."
What is the equivalent of freshmeat for web 2.0 apps (i.e., a place where you can announce updates of your app)?
They've been very responsive to my feedback as well.
Not a freshmeat equivalent, but do it on your own blog.
Hmmm makes sense, admittedly I love programming in Ruby but this article caused me to check out Python and Django :)
In this article, this author writes why he chose Python over Ruby: http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/why_py
Most bloggers don't have enough of an audience for that to be worthwhile.

A freshmeat equivalent would be better.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Really, these guys aren't claiming to be YCombinator II. They're just validating the model and wanting to do something similar in Europe. They clearly state on their page "This site is inspired by, but not affiliated with YCombinator."

The YCombinators should be flattered, and everyone who participates in YC can give themselves a pat on the back for being funded by the original YC-style firm. [Hm, that has a nice ring: "YC funding" vs "VC funding". I wonder if that was intentional.]

Edit: Oh, now I see that they only added the disclaimer after a post in this thread called them out on it...
Thanks, colourlovers works really well for me.
I don't speak Scheme, I'm sorry.
I think that it's great there's something like Y in Europe for startups. Anything that helps to promote entrepreneurs are great. The 'issue' here is that YEurope, the "Y" implies that you're associated with YCombinator...which is kind of misleading. Secondly, the questions are exactly the same as the Y right down to the period. The program could have reworded it, took out irrelevant questions or add some more like TechStars did. Thirdly, the design of the site looks relatively similar to that of Y's with the huge sliding picture in the front.

If you want to use the questions right down to the period, might have been better if you emailed and asked the Y team if you could do that.

I know its weird and you're probably thinking, who cares if they copy right down to the period? Its giving entrepreneurs a chance. Yes, but at least give credit where credit is due.
Y Combinator Day, Pt. 1
I've thought about this for a bit and I really don't know who needs who more so I like to think a non-hacker needs a hacker both equally. For example, if a non-hacker can't find a hacker, he'll go hire one. Hiring one might not be the best approach but if you have the money to spend, why not? Of course it's always better to have a hacker as as cofounder. Now, a hacker - can be business savvy so he wouldn't need a non-hacker.

But lets think about this, you have a hacker who thinks he doesn't need a non-hacker. Well, most of the applications that hackers most likely build is for other hackers. When you speak to VCs, how many of them are hackers? Or a bunch of hacker guys building a 'fashion site'...uh what do guys know about fashion. In this case, I would go find a non-hacker chick to join the team b/c she'll know all the avenues and forum girls go to - marketing power.

You can build, but what you build won't always get users. I know there seems to be a view in Silicon Valley that MBAs are morons but it's wrong to lump them all into one group. I could easily say that a lot of hackers, while brilliant, may build something really 'cool' but so entirely 'useless.'

A hacker and non-hacker team is the best combination. You both need each other equally. There's no "I" in "Team."
Good luck to you. I'm nervous for your guys! The Y team seems to be people you can talk to, I guess that's why they're so attractive to entrepreneurs.

Either way, very exciting
I think throwing a parties or other social events for hackers would be more effective. This lets you all network and get to know each other, and brings together everyone from across the campus into one spot. You want to actually form a friendship and get to know someone before deciding to become cofounders. "Cofounder" isn't a position with a posting on a job board and an interview.
Top 10 Myths of Making Money Online
Can anyone build a site for sharing startup ideas?
(1) If I have an idea but don't have the time to implement it, let someone pick it up through this site.

(2) If I have an idea but I'd like to "check the waters" before implementing it.

(3) Any brainstorming.

Most of us shouldn't be afraid of sharing ideas openly, because the value of what we do mostly is in how we do it.
If you're thinking about looking at a Python web framework, you could do worse than to read this O'Reilly book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596513719/

(Full disclosure: I'm acquainted with the author, and involved with one of the projects discussed in the book, Pylons.)
Web Development in Scheme- What's The Best Way?
SISCWeb? the plt webserver? Something else maybe?
jesusphreak, the author of that blog post, has since moved away from Django. He comes by #pylons every now and then, complaining about the Django community. I'm also not really sure if he ever actually has written anything.

But at any rate, here's a more recent post by him: http://jesusphreak.infogami.com/blog/vrp1
DivX Launches Its Own YouTube, Stage6
And more importantly - can anyone follow up on mojuba's premis? http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=15710
was wondering why this isn't even mentioned in TechCrunch
waffle and nothing to download? There is a windows client available for download. Also read their new blog posting for more information: http://blog.gravityzoo.com/pivot/entry.php?id=21
That sounds like a neat idea - but why don't you just use a wiki?
This ebusinessmba.com guy is seriously persistent. It can't be that news.yc users are generating good ad clickthrough.
Wiki sucks in many respects, including lack of true parallelism, while a simple reddit-like system with discussions would work better, perhaps with some modifications.
Unfortunately, self-promotion is king these days, but the site is not bad.
Perhaps you could use freshmeat for that if only there weren't a requirement for posting a link to your tarball, which obviously doesn't make sense for web sites. Freshmeat could have done that if asked to, I guess.
Hum, and for some unknown reasons Paypal do not allow accounts from Bulgaria (EU country)
Paul Graham did. What was that site again...
"For example, if a non-hacker can't find a hacker, he'll go hire one."

You can't build a successful tech business with a hired hacker. By choosing to hire, you'll only be able to attract programmers who are willing to work for the money you can pay them. The cream of the crop will pass you up in favor of startups that give them equity. Your first technical person sets a ceiling on the technical ability of your subsequent hires, because bad programmers are not able to recognize great ones.

If you're right and you do find a market niche that's extremely profitable, you'll invite competition. One of those competitors will inevitably have a top-notch hacker as a cofounder, and then you'll get eaten for lunch as their small, nimble team of elite hackers copies everything you do and then innovates way beyond it.

Many companies tried this approach in the dot-com boom, with predictable results. For example, Altavista/Lycos/Infoseek got eaten by Google, Value America by Amazon, Friendster and now MySpace by FaceBook.
You could just put up a simple forum and people can just enter their "Idea" as a topic on the forum.